28 Why are C and C++ so popular and widely-used?
Description
This article is from the alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++ Frequently Asked Questions. Compiled by Sunil Rao sunil.rao@ic.ac.uk.
28 Why are C and C++ so popular and widely-used?
(First part of answer adapted from a March 1998 comp.lang.c post by Kaz Kylheku on "Why Has C Proved To Be Such A Succesful Language")
C has always been a language that never attempts to tie a programmer down - it allows for easy implementation, it comes with a genuinely useful standard library that can itself be implemented in C, and it is both efficient and portable. C has always appealed to systems programmers who like the terse, concise manner in which powerful expressions can be coded. C was widely distributed with an Operating System (Unix) that was actually largely written in C itself. Also, C allowed programmers to (while sacrificing portability) have direct access to many machine-level features that would otherwise require the use of Assembly Language.
As Dennis Ritchie writes in his paper, "The Development of the C Language",
C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success. While accidents of history surely helped, it evidently satisfied a need for a system implementation language efficient enough to displace assembly language, yet sufficiently abstract and fluent to describe algorithms and interactions in a wide variety of environments.
C++ has its basis in C - extending it by supporting features meant to encourage and support the development of large programs. Perhaps most importantly, it supports object-oriented programming in a familiar setting and framework (that of C). When C++ was created, one of the initial aims was to retain compatibility with C to as large an extent as possible, and retain its spirit and efficiency. It was possible to convert from C to C++ gradually, thus making use of C++ (initally, at least) as a "better C", and moving on to using other features. This allowed many C programmers to learn C++ quickly (though using C++ effectively requires a major mind-shift for many C programmers).
Continue to:
My Books
