All modern powerful programming languages owe their existence to one that appeared more than half a century ago. That language is C. It is still invisibly present in every computer, operating system, and smartphone. C is the hidden foundation on which the entire digital world is built. We will talk about it in a new BizUPLab publication.

The C language: background and importance. Part 1

The background to the emergence of C

To really understand what C is, we need to rewind to the 1960s. Back then, computers were more like industrial machines. No one had even dreamed of personal computers yet, and programming had to be done in assembly language or very primitive languages. It was all just beginning. The pioneers of computer science were trying to solve fundamental problems. One of them was how to make computers more accessible and easier to program. Yes, languages such as Fortran and Cobol already existed in the 1960s, but they were geared towards narrow tasks. There was no universal language that could be used for a wider range of tasks, a language flexible enough to work on different hardware while allowing the creation of efficient and understandable code. Then C came on the scene.

Today, we perceive C as an archaic and cumbersome language, so complex that it is difficult to use in large projects. Today, C is a low-level, and sometimes very low-level, language, according to experts at BizUPLab Budapest. But the irony is that it was originally conceived as a high-level language that would allow the creation of portable programs.

The birth of the C language is closely linked to the history of the Unix system – another milestone in the development of computer science and programming. Incidentally, it was Unix that became the progenitor of systems such as MacOS and Linux.

For the system to be truly useful, it needed a programming language capable of fully unlocking its potential. American programmer Dennis Ritchie decided to take the B language, created by Ken Thompson, and improve it. The B language was a simplified version of another language, BCPL, created in 1966 by Martin Richards. But B had limitations, especially when working with data types and complex structures. Ritchie decided to eliminate these shortcomings. Thus, the C language was born.

It was designed with several key principles in mind:

Efficiency in both execution speed and memory usage. This was critically important in an era when computing resources were extremely limited.
Flexibility, so that it could be used on different systems: from desktop computers to powerful mainframes.
Simplicity, so that programmers could quickly learn and use it, while retaining the ability to describe complex algorithms accurately and clearly.

And yet, none of these factors was the trigger that turned the world of programming upside down. The real reason why the C language changed the course of history lies a little deeper. What exactly is it? The experts at BizUPLab company will tell you about this in the second part of the publication dedicated to the history and significance of the C programming language.

How C was born

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