[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[Simon Clubley]

On 2022-02-01, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
> On 2022-02-01 19:28, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> On 2022-02-01, Dave Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>>> On 2/1/2022 9:01 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>> On 2022-01-31, Dave Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Don't people ever wonder what DEC people were thinking when they wrote VMS?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Yes, I do. Then I remember it was written in the 1970s. :-) :-)
>>>
>>> What does that have to do with anything?
>>>
>> 
>> What makes some things about VMS so limiting in the 21st century is
>> as a direct result of it being designed in the 1970s instead of it
>> being designed around more modern techniques and concepts.
>> 
>> I believe I may have expressed some opinions in this area previously. :-)
>
> This kind of argument always have the same problem that Unix is even 
> older. Does that mean Unix have an even larger problem?
>
> Or is this in fact not a factor in there?
>

No. It means that the Unix creators were _very_ insightful and _very_
forward looking in the early 1970s when they rewrote Unix, including
the kernel, in a mostly portable language that mostly decoupled the
implementation from the architecture it ran on, while most other people
still wrote their kernels, and maybe good portions of their userland
as well, in assembly language.

They were also very insightful in that the minimum application programming
language they supported was also C. These factors laid the groundwork
for the future use of Unix across a large range of architectures and
was directly responsible for its rise to the position it gained.

They were a good 10 years earlier with these moves than when these ideas
started to become mainstream.

DEC OTOH, took the traditional approach for the time and wrote their VMS
kernel in an assembly language that was directly tied to the architecture
and also allowed assembly language to be used as an application programming
language, which directly impacted how the VMS APIs were designed.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.