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C's big claim to fame and the reason Dennis Ritchie deserves the Turing Award was because he did something they said couldn't be done. He created a high level language that was portable, at high performance, leaving no room for a language lower than assembler. We can niggle about the C declaration syntax and other things that didn't work out so well, but it's really important to recognise that those are side experiments that were details in a much larger thing that he accomplished. Now, advance another decade. 1979 and early 1980s – Bjarne is working at Bell Labs on C++ and what he accomplished there was to take a systems programming language that was portable, with strong abstractive power especially with classes and templates. He proved that you could actually do a portable systems programming language with strong abstraction and strong typing. That was a major advance. I would love to see somebody tackle the challenge of demonstrating that you can create a portable systems language (meaning that it has performance equal to C, C++, Fortran) that is portable, type safe, and also memory safe. To add that on top of classes and templates and the portability of C, to add strong type safety (which requires a form of garbage collection) and not leave performance on the table – that would be something. That would be the first strong competition to C++ on its home turf.
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