Dennis Ritchie: The C man who booted Unix It was 1968 and students and workers were on the march, protesting against the Vietnam War, with the western world seemingly teetering on the brink of revolution. In the sleepy, leafy suburb of New Jersey's Murray Hill, a young maths and physics graduate was laying the groundwork for an entirely different revolution. For …
I keep reading that C is the second most popular language, and some suggestion that the most popular is Java. Based on LOC, I guess. That seems a little unfair since C is one of the world's least verbose languages and used in situations which demand a small amount of code running extremely quickly and reliably.
Shouldn't the count be of number of instances of the software running? In which case, count a handful of instances of Tomcat for each corporate Java project and hundreds of millions for every embedded device, phone, TV, car dashboard, router, GPS (...) running a C-based RTOS or Linux.
And what are Java VMs written in, anyway?
Thanks for the link, that's really interesting. It appears they are counting people-popularity (number of engineers, courses etc.) rather than LOC, projects or whatever. Interesting to see how C# has stolen quite a bit of Java's fire, leaving C almost back at pole position.
But I wonder if this might favour old and university-course languages. For example, (who (uses-p `LISP)) any more??
OK, scrap that - here is the definition of the Tiobe metric:
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_definition.htm
Basically counting search results on +"<language> programming"! Worthless, surely? What's the betting C will spike next month?
Well, here's my contribution to the index in roughly cronological order:
BBC Basic programming ARM Assembler programming C programming C++ programming Javascript programming
Unqualified generalizations like "C is one of the world's least verbose languages" are worthless, particularly in a context like measuring SLOC, since that generally - by definition - doesn't include runtimes. Many programming languages have huge, feature-rich runtimes available to them as part of the standard language spec, which isn't the case with C. In domains where those runtimes cover a large portion of the application's requirements, such languages can be used to implement the application with far fewer lines of source code than you'd need with standard C.
There are domains for which C is very well suited, and there are a lot more where it does a decent job. But it's not "least verbose" in general. Take a typical commercial APL application (yes, there still are some) and rewrite it in C, then see how many characters of source each one has. Or a typical non-trivial Ruby app, and so on.
Ritchie remains engraved in my memory as one of the authors of "The C Programming Language," a first edition book through which I struggled as I learned to code in that "new" language. I was attempting to get a video camera and an 8088 based computer to "see" objects, and grew to appreciate the difficulty inherent to emulating even one narrow aspect of human perception.
Still have the book.
I didn't see one. Odd considering that Google stood on his shoulders.
C was a great language back in the day and still stands the test of time today. It's powerful and also allows you to shoot yourself in the foot, but it does so elegantly. Such side effects can't really be avoided in a language which assumes that the programmer knows what they're doing, that's why it's so powerful.
As a company that has trained over 3,000 graduates in UNIX and began its business by offering UNIX training, FDM Group has commemorated the life of Dennis Ritchie.
Check out what our CEO has to say about the pioneering efforts of this inspirational man: http://www.fdmacademy.com/fdm-group-commemorates-unix-inventor-dennis-ritchie/
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