How Relevant is C in 2014?

Nerval's Lobster writes: Many programming languages have come and gone since Dennis Ritchie devised C in 1972, and yet C has not only survived three major revisions, but continues to thrive. But aside from this incredible legacy, what keeps C atop the Tiobe Index? The number of jobs available for C programmers is not huge, and many of those also include C++ and Objective-C. On Reddit, the C community, while one of the ten most popular programming communities, is half the size of the C++ group. In a new column, David Bolton argues that C remains extremely relevant due to a number of factors including newer C compiler support, the Internet ("basically driven by C applications"), an immense amount of active software written in C that's still used, and its ease in learning. "Knowing C provides a handy insight into higher-level languages — C++, Objective-C, Perl, Python, Java, PHP, C#, D and Go all have block syntax that's derived from C." Do you agree?

Comments

Embedded Systems

[Anonymous Coward]

Those widgets the clueless newspaper reporters and marketers call 'the internet of things', otherwise known as embedded systems, depends on Linux and C. So therefore C is 'the next big thing'.

Re:Embedded Systems

[Tom]

and the people who do use C are not interested either since they tend not to be language fetishists.

This. Half of the newer high-level languages today are just the mental masturbations of someone who either thinks he can make the wheel more round or the result of a "not invented here" mindset. There's so much crap out there forking a perfectly good language because someone thinks it should be a =+ b; instead of a += b;

It's sickening, and a good reason to stay away from all this shit, because five years down the road someone will fork the fork and you can throw all your code away because support and development just stops as all the ADD kids jump at the new toy. That'll never happen with your C code.

Re:Embedded Systems

[chuckinator]

I agree with PP and GP, but there's more to it than just that. Software is like an organ of your computer; your computer typically won't do much worthwhile if there's not a whole bunch of the things working together to make complete systems. Almost every one of the higher level languages are implemented in C at some point in the software stack. Some might argue that certain JVM languages like Scala and Groovy and Clojure are written in pure java, but guess what? The JVM is written in C. Almost every piece of software out in the wild is either written in C or depends on critical components written in C all the way down to the operating system. If you're running embedded, you might not have an OS, but you probably should be using C on microcontrollers and embedded systems unless there's a real good reason not to.

Re:Very relevent for small target embedded stuff.

[mean pun]

.. or at least people who think they are clever. Occasionally they are right.

Re:C is primordial

[rioki]

Ok I will bite. Now I don't claim that C is on the same level than ASM, but you need to compare it to current languages. Languages like Python or JavaScript, they abstract out almost everything about the machine you are running them on. With C you program against a reasonably close abstraction of the real machine. In many cases you can hand compile the C code to ASM.

Take for example the JS expression $("a").addClass("blue"). This expression written in C would take up something around 100 lines of code, simply because the machine you program against does not understand high level concepts. Even simple concepts like a string are not understood by C.

I love programming in C, but in whole ecosystem of languages it is on the low end.

Re:Very relevent for small target embedded stuff.

[TheRaven64]

The clever people use C when C is the right tool for the job and use something else when it isn't. The rest use C, Python, or whatever else their favourite language is, irrespective of whether it's the right tool.

Re:C is very relevant in 2014,

[gweihir]

C is not a tool for the incompetent (whether temporary due to alcohol or permanently). It is an expert-only tool. There are a few of those around and they will stay around, because in the hands of somebody skilled, these tools deliver exceptional results that no more generally usable tool can match.

Re:Very much so!

[jlar]

But C++ is a thousand times more than "C with objects".

I believe the above quote speaks for itself...