Even if you have no experience coding, you may have heard of a programming language called C. Introduced in 1972, it is a very old but extremely popular language that is supported on nearly all devices. As you might imagine, this makes it incredibly useful. Below is a ranking of the most popular programming languages. C is first, also note that there are many other popular languages derived from C!
C is considered a very powerful language, in that it is both lightweight and efficient. This is due to the fact that the language runs very close to the computer’s hardware, while other languages operate “further away” from the processor (think of it as more steps to get to the actual calculations.) Incidentally, this makes more susceptible to security breaches. (“With great power comes great responsibility.”) So if you wanted to design a server where many different people are accessing files, and you only want certain people to have access to certain files, there are better languages than C to accomplish this task. C is capable of achieving the design, there are just multiple security flaws that have been discovered over the recent years.
A recent example of C being utilized in a project is Curiosity, the mars rover. It runs 2.5 million lines of C. Imagine the great task of making sure all that code is bug free and running bug free before sending millions of kilometers to another world. Here is a link to the JPL coding standard used in this project. Potentially interesting to any computer programmers as it is full of great coding standards to follow, and just a fantastic technical document in general!
Thanks for reading this week!
Coding Languages for the Non-Programmer 