Table of contents
Introduction
It is estimated that more than 90% of the electronic devices in the world are powered by C programming language.
So, C is one of the oldest general-purpose programming languages used today. C is basically a mid-level language having the simplicity of a high-level language as well as the power of a low-level language. Almost all modern languages have copied directly or indirectly either some features or syntax of C. C++ is almost C-language with some minor tweaks and some additional functionality. It's a small language with only 32 keywords in the English language.
One who can learn C can learn any other modern programming language.
History
C was developed in the 1970s at Bell Laboratories of AT&T labs by Dennis Ritchie. In its initial days, C was designed for programming purposes in an operating system called UNIX. But as C went through its advent, the whole UNIX operating system was later rewritten in C. C was derived from a language called B- language which was developed by Ken Thompson at AT&T Bell Laboratories and as a matter of fact the B-language was itself adopted from a language called BCPL(stands for Basic Common Programming Language) developed by Martin Richards at Cambridge University.
Uses
When it comes to fast and efficient coding C is one of the very few options to go with.
Being a mid-level language it is used to write both application programs and system programs.
C is used to develop compilers. Many well-known compilers like MINGW, Dev-C, APPLE C etc. were developed by using the C programming language.
Since C provides direct memory access, it is used for scripting programs and drivers for embedded systems.
C is used to write interpreters for high-level languages like python. CPython, MATLAB etc. are the most famous interpreters developed using C.
C language is used to develop new languages for programming or development purposes like C++ (also known as C with classes), Python, Java, JavaScript, Perl and the Unix C shell are examples of these languages.
Advantages
One of the biggest advantages of C is that it provides direct control over memory, which means programmers can have direct access to memory, which is a rare feature of programming languages.
Programs written in C are portable which means they can run on different computers with different operating systems.
It's a beginner-friendly language with very few syntactic rules.
It's one of the fastest and most efficient languages out there.
If someone tries to build his/her programming skill really strong then he/she must look for C. To code in C language one needs to write codes for almost everything (operations like searching, sorting etc.) as C does not come with tonnes of inbuilt library functions for almost everything like another high-level language (python, java etc.). Which ultimately helps in building intuition & making our skills stronger.
Disadvantages
Nothing in this balanced & perfect world is perfect, so with C also. Here are a few major problems faced by a C programmer while using C language -
It lacks almost every feature of a high-level language.
It is said that the real power of c languages lies in pointers (a special feature of C language), but being misused as a pointer can lead to an operating system crash.
C lacks Object Oriented Programming feature.
Programmers have to free memory in case of dynamic memory allocation which sometimes becomes cumbersome.
Since all the errors are displayed together after the code is compiled, it sometimes makes debugging tough, especially in large codes.