Demis Ritchie at Bell Labs developed C. It was a small utility programme for Unix operating system in 1972. Thus next year, C will complete 50 years. Its efficiency and power was such that the whole unix was rewritten in C. By 1980’s C was considered the high performance software.

As C is used to programme machine, It is called low-level language. Jawa and Python are called high-level language used in web and mobile applications.

C is used to develop the kernel of any operating system (OS). A kernel is the interface between the OS and machine. OS is wraps the hardware and provides access to the internals of the hardware. The kernel enables us to access the private parts of the hardware such as CPU, the memory, the network card and the file system.

C is an open source project maintained by GNU. It is run by Free Software Foundation.

C uses fewer libraries. Libraries have pre-written codes for specific tasks. C developers thus have better control over the code. C is a lean, fast and powerful language. In C unused code is cleaned manually. There is no garbage collector to do this.

C is appropriate for embedding it in various devices and to facilitate machine-to-machine communication in IoT. Most IoT devices are programmed using C. It consumes least memory resources. The system performs in real time. Washing machines or TV remote run on firmware are programmed in C. Ethernet, the building block of Internet, is programmed in C.

C keeps on evolving even offer 50 years. There are new versions. There are new features.

India has not enough C programmers-there are about 30000 of them in India. Though engineering syllabus teaches C, students migrate to other languages like Jawa and C++.

India proposes to develop electronics and semiconductors. There is going to be a demand for C programmers.