[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2022-02-02 19:41, Simon Clubley wrote:
> 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.

You are ignoring Bliss?
Heck, even parts of RSX is written in Bliss.

(But with that said, you are certainly right that portability was not on 
DECs mind...)

But now we're talking about implementation details.

You said above:
"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."

The implementation language have pretty much nothing to do with the design.

Maybe what you actually meant is that the problem with VMS was that the 
implementation was done in a very 70s non-portable way?

   Johnny