> it's only a matter of computational speed, we knew about "advanced concepts" in the 30s of the last century already.
Believe it or not, but type theory and CS in general have kept making progress since. I know lambda calculus existed in the 30s, but it was a lot more basic in many ways.
C is so primitive. It has a poor type system, it has no sum types (enums, in rust), no closures, no type inference, no bound checking even though it was already known to be beneficial, really its strong point is that it's easy to compile. If you think these are just "computational speed", that's fine, but other people think these are qualitative improvements.
> C is so primitive. It has a poor type system, it has no sum types (enums, in rust), no closures, no type inference, no bound checking even though it was already known to be beneficial,
computational speed mattered.
compilers needed to be fast.
bounds checking is not really in the ballpark of "advancements in CS".
C could easily become a better language and evolve, the problem is it needs to maintain the billions of lines already written valid.
OTOH there were better languages already when C came out, C won in large part because it was simpler, smaller and a better ASM than ASM.
Rust is a safer language, the problem is once we rewrote everything in Rust, Rust will be as legacy as C and new languages with better features enabled by the orders of magnitude faster chips will be available.
It's like when young people blame the older people, forgetting that they will be old too one day and that in most part life is keeping going on evolving things at a very slow pace, because inertia is the strongest force in societies.
Believe it or not, but type theory and CS in general have kept making progress since. I know lambda calculus existed in the 30s, but it was a lot more basic in many ways.
C is so primitive. It has a poor type system, it has no sum types (enums, in rust), no closures, no type inference, no bound checking even though it was already known to be beneficial, really its strong point is that it's easy to compile. If you think these are just "computational speed", that's fine, but other people think these are qualitative improvements.