Re: The joy of FORTRAN-like languages

On 28/09/2024 14:20, John Levine wrote:

C was in the sweet spot of being not all that great, but better than any of the
plausible alternatives at the time.

I was late to discovering C. In the 1970's I lived in Denmark, and our terminals, printers, keyboards etc were using a national version of the ISO standard interchange code that Americans kn ow as ASCII.
Since Danish have three unique (well sort-of shared with Swedish and Norvegian) vowels at the end of the alphabet (æ ø å / Æ Ø Å), these were allocated at the end of the alphabet - after z / Z. When you look at the ASCII character table, you will see that each of these conflicts with significant symbols of the C language ({ \ } / [ | ]). This created a strong disincentive to experiment with a "fringe" programming language.
It really was not until I got to California that it became easy to write C. And by then, I was working on VMS and Unix (V7 on a pdp11/70, soon replaced by 4.2BSD on a VAX-11/750).
Back when ACC stood for Associated Computer Consultants, I became lars@acc - which then became lars@acc.arpa, even though we landed on the MILNET side of the divide.