What is C?

• Since the late 19th century, C has been a popular programming language for general-purpose use.
• C language was developed by Dennis M. Ritchie at Bell Laboratories in the early 1970s.
• Its applications are very diverse. It ranges from developing operating systems to databases and more. It is a system programming language used to do low-level programming (e.g., driver or kernel).
• Even if it’s old, it is still a very popular programming language.
• As the whole UNIX operating system was written in C, it has a strong association with operating systems.
• C has also been used widely while creating iOS and Android kernels.
• MySQL database is written using C.
• Ruby and Perl are mostly written using C.
• Most parts of Apache and NGINX are written using C.
• Embedded Systems are created using C.

Why should we learn C/ Features of C?

• As mentioned above, it is one of the most popular programming languages in the world.
• Learning any other popular programming language such as Python or C++ becomes much easier if you know C.
• C is a flexible language, proven by the fact that it can be used in a variety of applications as well as technologies.
• C is very fast when compared to other programming languages, be it Java or Python.
• C takes only significant CPU time for interpretation. That is why a lot of Python libraries such as NumPy, pandas, Scikit-learn, etc., are built using C.
• Being close to machine language, some of its functions include direct access to machine-level hardware APIs.
• It is a structural language (follows a specific structure) and a compiled language.
• It is a procedural programming language (POP). Procedural programming is the use of code in a step-wise procedure to develop applications.

How is it different from C++?

• The syntax of C++ is almost identical to that of C, as C++ was developed as an extension of C.
• In contrast to C, C++ supports classes and objects, while C does not.
• C gives most of the control to the hands of users. Things like memory allocation and manipulation are totally in the hands of the programmer. Being a flexible language, it provides more access to the programmer, making it more efficient.
• C is POP (procedure-oriented programming), whereas C++ is OOP (object-oriented programming).