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Objective-C Overtakes C++, But C Is Number One
mikejuk writes "Although the TIOBE Index has its shortcomings, the finding that Objective-C has overtaken C++ is reiterated in the open source Transparent Language Popularity Index. The reason is, of course, that Objective-C is the language you have to use to create iOS applications — and as iPads and iPhones have risen in popularity, so has Objective-C. If you look at the raw charts then you can see that C++ has been in decline since about 2005 and Objective-C has shot up to overtake it with amazing growth. But the two charts are on different scales: if you plot both on the same chart, you can see that rather than rocketing up, Objective-C has just crawled its way past, and it is as much to do with the decline of C++. It simply hasn't reached the popularity of C++ in its heyday before 2005. However the real story is that C, a raw machine independent assembler-like language, with no pretense to be object oriented or sophisticated, has beaten all three of the object oriented heavy weights — Java, C++ and Objective C. Yes C is number one (and a close second in the transparent index)."
typedef struct { // And data goes here.
int (*open)(void *self, char *fspec);
int (*close)(void *self);
int (*read)(void *self, void *buff, size_t max_sz, size_t *p_act_sz);
int (*write)(void *self, void *buff, size_t max_sz, size_t *p_act_sz);
} tCommClass;
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/351733/can-you-write-object-oriented-code-in-c
Mod parent up. "The popular search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings." That's rather lame. Exactly how do they search for "C", anyway? Do Sesame Street episodes brought to you by the letter C count?
The decline in C++ is probably real. It's on the way out as an application-level programming language. Big, complex applications with serious performance requirements and elaborate internal data structures, like 3D CAD, benefit from being written in C++. But there's no reason to write a routine desktop business app in it any more. Just moving windows and menus around and talking to the database can be done far more easily by other means.
The advantage of the object oriented paradigm is not primarily that it makes programming easier or faster. It is the better support of separation between different components, which makes it possible to contain the complexity of large projects with multiple software engineers.
Of course, there are other ways of handling large projects (for example, there are examples of large projects written in C that control complexity by conventions about the separation of data and modules). But the object oriented paradigm is a common choice for large software engineering projects.
You might miss this when learning from a text book, since you are often only given small code examples and toy object hierarchies. But that extra 'overhead' around the defining of object abstraction pays off as the complexity increases. For many problems, thinking in terms of objects rather than instruction sequences can make the problem easier to solve.
Starting off with C and moving to C++ is not necessarily a good process, as you will not begin to learn to think in terms of objects; it is a completely different way of problem solving. Even for experienced programmers, the transition from C to C++ can be a six month process, not because of the extra language features, but because it requires a change in approach. Many don't stick at it long enough to realize the benefits.
The trade-off over speed is not an issue at all; for example, C++ is not significantly slower than C. Speed is affected far more by other choices; data structures and algorithms, memory localization, parallelism, and so on.
And you would also be aware that there are other paradigms as well, such as functional programming. These paradigms are not just "different tools for the job". They can have a radical impact on problem solving methods.