Origins of the BitC Programming Language, The

Introduction Designing a coherent and sensible programming language is hard. Even if technically successful, a new language is preposterously unlikely to achieve broad penetration. Because of this, it has become fashionable for programming language designers to explain from the comfortable perspective of hindsight why they thought to undertake such an absurd task, what they hoped they might accomplish, and perhaps what they (re)discovered along the way. In this paper we describe the original motivation and early evolution of the BitC programming language. BitC started as an attempt to address a specific problem, and morphed rapidly into a full-blown programming language effort. Along the way our ideas and thoughts about languages suffered some severe setbacks and some interesting (at least to us) turns. We will try to address some of those here.