History and Popularity of the C Programming Language, The

A short essay about the origins of the C programming language and why it became so popular so quickly. The C programming language and its direct descendants are by far the most popular programming languages used in the world today. Most competent programmers know how to use C, and usually C is a programmer's language of choice. This structurally tiny language originated at Bell Labs in order to write the first Unix operating system for a DEC PDP-7 computer with only 8K bytes of memory. In spite of its small beginnings, C has scaled up to run on powerful super-computers with gigabytes of memory. The language is extremely portable; it is possible to write a program in C for just about every platform in existence. Yet, if one takes a more in depth look at C, one realizes that it is rather weak and has an extremely small vocabulary. How did C become so popular despite its deficiencies? This paper will explore the history of the C programming language and discuss the different aspects of the language in an attempt to determine why this language has thrived in spite of there being more powerful and better structured object oriented languages in existence. Portions of this paper get a little technical, but it is beyond the scope of this essay to teach the reader all the intricacies of C; however, the reader unfamiliar with C will still be able to follow the arguments, and thus come away with an understanding of how C was born and why it is so popular.