There should be some type of Nobel Prize type prize that should be bestowed upon Dennis Ritchi. There are probably few accomplishments in the 20th century that have had more effect on society than the C programming language. From it we also got Unix (and all that led to), tons of computer programs and many other languages based off of C. (For all you Windows and Mac fans, C has been a crucial part of those OS's too.)
C, for all of its criticisms, is one great language. Despite all the advances in computer science over the years, at the end of the day, many people continue to come back to C. (Unlike FORTARN where the entire civilized world has moved on, except for people who are slaves to codes that were written by previous generations of scientists.)
Let's also not forget, Python is really just a "grandiose wrapper" around C. :)
Aaahhh, yes. C language. I remember coding in it back in the 1980s. It was so fun to watch a little bit of bad code send an errant bit across the hard drive. Fortunately, back then it didn't take long to reload the operating system and software on a 5 megabyte hard drive!
ReplyDeleteWhen I made the career choice to be a UI developer way back when, it was based on the fact that most UI frameworks were moving to object oriented languages. I used MFC back then. The object oriented UI frameworks were replacing all the haggard C UI libraries. Now I'm moving into ActionScript (Adobe's Flex) from Java's Swing. I've never been envious of those I see using C. I guess technically I could say I was a C programmer at one time, though it was K&R C recently moved to a C++ compiler, so I had C++ available to me (and I used it a lot!) I don't put C on my resume, or even C++ these days.
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