History of C Language Development

Primitive Era

It is generally believed that the most primitive programming language is machine language, consisting of 0s and 1s. This is meaningless because humans cannot actually write 0s and 1s; thus, people transcribed these 0s and 1s into a more readable format and let machines translate it back into 0s and 1s for storage. This is known as primitive assembly language.

Ancient Era

Building on assembly language, many high-level languages were invented, among which C language is the most successful. The C language solved the problems arising from assembly language, eliminating the need to consider changes in instructions due to types and storage locations.

Simply put, the C language greatly abstracted assembly language, translating C code into a form supported by the processor instruction set through the C compiler, a process known as compilation.

Medieval Era

To better develop GUI applications, object-oriented (OO) programming became mainstream, prompting the addition of features to the C language to enable OO programming. Among these, the standout is C++ language.

The early C++ language was almost fully compatible with C language syntax and provided powerful OO programming capabilities, utilizing existing memory allocation patterns and pointer operations in C to implement features such as object creation, inheritance, and polymorphism. However, this approach also led to another disaster: memory leaks. After introducing OO to the language, the issue of forgetting to release created objects began to surface, and C++ was once considered the most error-prone language.

Modern Era

To address the issues exposed by C++, Java language was invented. Java introduced the concepts of intermediate language and virtual machine, where Java programs are first compiled into an intermediate language (ByteCode), which is then analyzed and executed by the Java runtime running on various computers.

In fact, the “compile once, run anywhere” concept targets languages like C/C++ that compile directly to native code. In this sense, Java has achieved the theoretical possibility of “compile once, run anywhere”.

• The C language was invented in 1972, initially used for rewriting the UNIX operating system.

• With the success of the UNIX operating system, the C language was widely promoted, being used on large, medium, small, and microcomputers, and remains one of the most popular and widely used high-level programming languages today.

• The C language is a procedural language, not an object-oriented language.