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How popular was C in the early 1980s though? I suspect BASIC and assembly where much more prominent until late in the decade.
by nateglims 2y ago
How popular was C in the early 1980s though? I suspect BASIC and assembly where much more prominent until late in the decade.
- msephton 2y agoC was very popular throughout the 1980s, and was the first choice for systems programming. C was created in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie. In 1973 he used it to rewrite the entire Unix kernel. The popularity of both C and Unix grew alongside eachother. The preeminent C book by Kernighan & Ritchie was published in 1978, with 2nd edition coming in 1988 with ANSI-C staged. The book was the first use of "Hello, world!". So even that was very influential. Great article for further reading: https://www.jakeo.com/words/clanguage.php https://www.jakeo.com/words/clanguage.php
- kamaal 2y agoC was very much the Python of its times, may be even bigger. Especially given the fact that it started a whole family of programming languages being derived from it. C++ was very much the language of choice for larger applications till Java came along. Till date if you are writing code for embedded systems the only language you can do so in is C. Even until very recently most beginner programming courses/approaches required you learn C. Learn Pointers, recursion well enough before you could learn anything else.