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All At C
The C swell gets ever higher13 November 2013
by Huw Collingbourne
You might think that an old language like C would long ago have bitten the dust.
After all, this language was created in the dim distant past of the late 1960s and early ’70s. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles we’ve come to expect from modern languages. It has no Object Orientation, no garbage collection, it has very little in the way of modularity, it isn’t ’visual’, heck, it doesn’t even have a string data-type.
And yet C is the language that refuses to die. In fact, it is not even sickly, let alone close to death. Far from it. According to the Tiobe Index, which assesses the relative ’health’ of (and demand for) programming language, C occupies the number 1 position. And, according to Infoworld, its lead over other languages is actually growing.
Just after C in the Tiobe index comes Java - an OOP language based on C syntax. Then come Objective-C and C++, two OOP languages that are directly built upon C itself. And after that there are various other languages that have derived a good deal of their syntax from C, such as C# and PHP.
While languages such as Python and Ruby might be favoured by many modern programmers, the Tiobe index lists those way lower than C and Java. C may seem to be a fairly old-style language, but the simple fact of the matter is that it does the job and it does it efficiently. I suspect it has a long and active life ahead of it yet.