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Is IoT a Reason To Learn C? (cio.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the more-you-know dept.

itwbennett writes: Whether or not beginning programmers should learn C is a question that has been roundly debated on Slashdot and elsewhere. The general consensus seems to be that learning it will make you a better programmer -- and it looks good on your resume. But now there might be another reason to learn C: the rapid growth of the internet of things (IoT) could cause a spike in demand for C skills, according to Gartner analyst Mark Driver. "For traditional workloads there is no need to be counting the bytes like there used to be. But when it comes to IoT applications there is that need once again..."

2 of 374 comments (clear)

  1. Re:They said the same about mobile by JanneM · · Score: 3, Informative

    The high-level VMs and the drivers to drive the specific hardware isn't developed by magical Low-Level Elves in Happy Rainbow Fairly Land. Every IoT device is going to have their oen special hardware stuff, and somebody needs to write the low-level code to interface with it. That is done in a combination of C and assembler.

    Also, at volume the price difference between a MCU that can run a VM and one that can not will be on the order of tens of cents (either currency). If you plan to make on the order of a million devices, then 20 cents per unit will more than pay for a programmer that knows to use the small MCU over a Java hack that does not.

    --
    Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
  2. Re:JavaScript ... and maybe Python by rgbe · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is a discussion about platforms that would buckle under the bulk of a micro-OS and a JS interpreter/VM stack. And that's not even handling the issue that most of these devices use embedded hardware platforms that you need to access with specific assembler calls - how would you do that in JS or Python!?

    There are a few JavaScript interpreters that use very minimal resources and have access to all the necessary hardware (wifi, BLE, SPI, UART, i2c, etc), these are Duktape http://duktape.org/, Espruino https://github.com/espruino/Es..., JerryScript https://github.com/jerryscript..., and more. These are all designed for IoT devices. For performance this is an interesting read: https://www.espruino.com/Perfo...