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Tegran

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I decided to do the "Five minutes of Wikipedia browsing" you suggested.

Under http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD I found this:

"In 1978 Roy Trubshaw, a student at Essex University in the UK, started working on a multi-user adventure game in the MACRO-10 assembly language for a DEC PDP-10. He named the game MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), in tribute to the Dungeon variant of Zork, which Trubshaw had greatly enjoyed playing.[18] Trubshaw converted MUD to BCPL (the predecessor of C), before handing over development to Richard Bartle, a fellow student at Essex University, in 1980.[19][20][21]

MUD, better known as Essex MUD and MUD1 in later years, ran on the Essex University network until late 1987,[22] becoming the first Internet multiplayer online role-playing game in 1980, when Essex University connected its internal network to ARPANet."

The descent to C 12 years ago

And there's no simple excuse for the preprocessor; I don't know exactly why that exists, but my guess is that back in the 1970s it was an easy way to get at least an approximation to several desirable language features without having to complicate the actual compiler.

Clearly this guy has never had to deal with a large, complicated code base in C. Dismissing the preprocessor as a crutch for a weak compiler shows a significant ignorance about the useful capabilities that it brings.

Once you've embedded the Hype Cycle in your consciousness, it's amazing how often new technologies follow it. Also interesting just how worked up people get at each peak and trough... :)