Fran's Blog

According to my favourite news source The Register or “El Reg”, C programming dominated the open source projects in 2008. I’m surprised and impressed!

I always put C down as the old thing you learn in computer science. It was certainly the first language I learnt and is a good base to start (albeit quite hard to learn as it is a little more low level than the Java and C#s of this world). I’m also guessing they encompass C++ and objective-C when they say “C”. Objective-C is making a big growth since the iphone’s applications are written in this language.

But I’m excited. I’m excited because low level programming languages allow good things; like the speed of them can be phenomenal if written correctly. They are tough to write partly for this reason. Memory management is not done for you. Scripting languages like PHP and Ruby have taken a slight tumble because of the C revolution. I’ll be interested to see where this goes in any case.

I really think since Microsoft Windows 7 is shaping up to be a slick (comparatively) little OS where they concentrate on performance and Apple’s Snow Leopard OS is doing the same, the next few years will be more concentrated on speed of an application rather than adding more features. This is exciting because no one likes to wait for things to load, or have to buy more RAM to upgrade to a new version of software. Slick and quick is, well, lovely.

Using C badly though could cause slower applications, and bugs that could cripple memory. Let’s hope people are writing wisely. Assembly anyone?