My tool for writing Varnish is the C-language which in many ways is unique amongst all of the computer programming languages for having no ambitions.
The C language was invented as a portable assembler language, it doesn't do objects and garbage-collection, it does numbers and pointers, just like your CPU.
Compared to the high ambitions, then as now, of new programming languages, that was almost ridiculous unambitious. Other people were trying to make their programming languages provably correct, or safe for multiprogramming and quite an effort went into using natural languages as programming languages.
But C was written to write programs, not to research computer science and that's exactly what made it useful and popular.
This is a great thing to meditate on when trying to understand why the language is still used.
My tool for writing Varnish is the C-language which in many ways is unique amongst all of the computer programming languages for having no ambitions.
The C language was invented as a portable assembler language, it doesn't do objects and garbage-collection, it does numbers and pointers, just like your CPU.
Compared to the high ambitions, then as now, of new programming languages, that was almost ridiculous unambitious. Other people were trying to make their programming languages provably correct, or safe for multiprogramming and quite an effort went into using natural languages as programming languages.
But C was written to write programs, not to research computer science and that's exactly what made it useful and popular.
This is a great thing to meditate on when trying to understand why the language is still used.