Python handles globals badly.

[rurpy at yahoo.com]

On Thursday, September 10, 2015 at 6:18:39 AM UTC-6, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Sep 2015 05:18 am, Chris Angelico wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 5:14 AM, Laura Creighton <lac at openend.se> wrote:
> >> In a message of Thu, 10 Sep 2015 05:00:22 +1000, Chris Angelico writes:
> >>>To get started, you need some other sort of kick.
> >>
> >> Having Brian Kernighan write a really nice book about you, helps a lot.
> > 
> > It kinda does. And of course, it also helps to have a time machine, so
> > you can launch your language when there are less languages around.
> > Today, you compete for attention with myriad languages that simply
> > didn't exist when C was introduced to an unsuspecting world.
> 
> I don't think that's quite right. I think, if anything, there were more
> languages in the 1970s than now, it's just that they tended to be
> proprietary, maybe only running on a single vendor's machine. But even if
> I'm mistaken, I think that there is near-universal agreement that the
> single biggest factor in C's popularity and growth during the 1970s and 80s
> is that it was tied so intimately to Unix, and Unix was taking over from
> mainframes, VAX, etc.

The growth of C and Unix were mutually interdependent, one was not 
the cause of the other.

A big factor in the growth of Unix was that it was portable to 
new hardware relatively easily, a portability made possible by C.

I note that even today, 3 or 4 decades later, the availability of 
Python on a wide variety of platforms is made possible by C.

I also doubt there were more programming languages around in the
1970s than now, on the grounds that there were far fewer people
capable of writing a compiler or interpreter in those days, and 
there were far fewer tools to help, or easily accessible knowledge 
about how to do do it.