Shawn Driscoll's Tech Blog


Stuff That Happened in the Past

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

There Are Better Programming Languages Than C



I just read an article, called Are All Programming Languages Based On C?, that says basically what I been saying about C since 1984 (maybe even earlier). That C is a programming language one uses to make much better programming languages with. People used C, back in the day, to avoid programming in Assembly code (aka ASM languages, or HEX code). So, C was a welcome programming language at the time.

ANSI C was kind of a big deal. For it allowed C code to run on any computer that had a C compiler. C programs ran much faster on computers that were usually programmed using BASIC or Pascal. And since C was so closely tied to the Assembly code it could produce, many programmers wrote hardware drivers using C. Even Operating Systems could be written in C.

Anyway. Thirty-plus years later, I still see people learning how to program a computer using C. Today, it's C++ or C# programming. But it is still the same thing. Basically, it's people writing typo-filled code and trying to compile and debug it. The code is clumsy to type, hard to look at, and is harder for others to follow through one's logic. This is what the schools are teaching though. It's like they want to keep computer programming as complicated as possible so that students think they are getting their money's worth out of a class.

As I said earlier, C is used to write much better programming languages. And there are a lot of much better programming languages available. And since nearly all programming languages are free now, it is much easier to access them for trying out.