C is still not dead as a programming language

I noticed in the recent EETimes that their top design feature from 2009 was “Real men program in C.” It was a nice revisit of my June 2007 blog post about a fellow that was quoted as saying that C was dead. Now please, the poor fellow called me up and swears that the journalist who wrote the article mis-quoted him, and that he knows that C is not dead, and please stop calling him an idiot.

As to the EETimes article, they state: “For today’s computer science students, learning C is like taking an elective class in Latin.” Well that should get the blood boiling in my pals veins. I love hearing my buddy John rant about how Java is “crippled C with the pointers taken out.”  I also note with amusement that the EETimes article refers to assembly language programming as a “style”. As someone who does not use C but has written in assembler since the 8085 days, I like to think of it as more than a style. You write in assembler when it has to be blazingly fast, rock-solid reliable, and run in the absolute minimum of memory. It’s a bit more that a programming style. It is nice to know what your processor is really doing when you try to debug the code. I remember working on a fingerprint reader that used a STD bus computer. Initializing a peripheral card in assembly: 15 bytes. Doing the exact same thing in C: 8,000 bytes. With things like Cypress Semiconductor’s pSoc (programmable system on a chip), you can create and use analog and digital blocks, lets say to make a UART or a ADC, and do it on the fly. I sure would like to at least understand the assembly language code that does this. If you folks want to trust your C compiler, go right ahead, I do hear they are much better that in the old days.

I do like it when the EETimes article points out: “…C appears to have spent the last five years stealing share from assembly as well as from C++.”  Hmm, has bloatware gotten its comeuppance, or is C++ just not understood properly by this new crop of programmers?