C language was developed by Dennis M Ritchie in the year 1972.
- It is an evergreen and non-exhaustive programming language.
- It was derived from the B language.
- C language was developed for the UNIX operating system. The entire UNIX operating system was written in C.
Why C execution is faster?
- C execution is very faster when compared to high-level languages like Java because C doesn’t need an abstraction layer such as JVM (Virtual machine).
- It can directly be compiled and executed on the bare computer machine.
Is C platform-dependent?
- The C program is platform-independent but C executables are platform-dependent.
- Once you write a C program you can compile it anywhere. But, If you generate a C executable on a Linux machine you cannot run it on windows.
- We should need to re-compile the same program in windows to get windows compatible executables.
Why C?
- Legacy programming languages such as C were highly recommended for beginners to understand the basic programming constructs clearly and precisely.
- The syntax and semantics of the C language were pretty easy to understand and nearly the same as widely used modern programming languages such as C++, Java, and C#.
- The most powerful and important concepts such as pointers, arrays, loops, dynamic memory allocations e.t.c, will make you understand how actually allocating, accessing, and modifying data will be done on the computer.
Is C preferred for competitive programming?
Yes, In recent years competitive programming (Code chef, Hacker Rank, Top Coder, SPOJ) has gained huge popularity among young programmers. Companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook want a programmer to be good at Data Structures and Algorithms.
- C++ the successor of the C language is highly recommended for competitive programming because, In competitive programming, high priority will be given to both space and time complexity.
- C++ runs a bit faster when compared to modern programming languages. C++ is one level abstraction of C. So as I said earlier if you know C then coding in C++ is not a big challenge.
Conclusion
If you are a beginner and want to become a good programmer, start your learning with C. Later, you can switch to modern programming languages such as C++, Java, and Python. Switching to these languages after C is like a cakewalk because C will make you strong enough in the basics of programming.