Comment by TurboHaskal
5 years ago
You are giving technical merits way too much credit.
People will put up with whatever bullshit as long as there is demand and helps them get a job.
The thing is, UNIX was a massive success, and it happened to be written in C. Since then, all successful languages had to have a familiar syntax with the host language.
It was UNIX that killed the Lisp Machine (by being given away for free). Programming languages never got to play a role.
Unix wasn't given away for free; it was strapped by AT&T licensing and you needed hardware that certainly wasn't free, and not still not affordable to individual consumers. But Unix was a resource-efficient system that scaled down to cheaper hardware with less RAM.
Even the dyed-in-the-wool Lisp enthusiasts headed by Richard Stallman were compelled to reproduce Unix, even though their stated goal was to have a system running Lisp.
Stallman decided to reimplement Unix because it was popular, not because it was somehow better suited to the hardware.
One of the first GNU programs he released was indeed his "system running Lisp"; it was called Emacs.
This is not the complete picture. Stallman decided to reimplement Unix because it had a combination of popularity and technical merit.
For instance, MS-DOS had a larger installed base than Unix at the time, but ... enough said about that, right?
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, as the saying goes.
A hacker like RMS isn't going to pour years of coding into making a C compiler, and Unix utilities, in his spare time, if he thinks those technologies do not have merit.
It was given to universities for free iirc