to define the beginning and end of a block of code.
Learning programming with C
The most popular curly-bracket language is C. The C language is popular for several reasons:
Power
Efficiency
Portability
The power of C
The C language is a curious combination of assembly language and high-level languages, like BASIC. Like assembly language, C provides commands for directly manipulating every part of the computer, including memory, hard disks, and printers. Like a high-level language, C lets you focus on the logic of your program without worrying about the technical details of the computer, so you get the best of both assembly language and high-level languages.
Because C programs are nearly (note the emphasis on the word nearly) as easy to write and understand as higher-level languages but still give you the power of accessing the computer's hardware like assembly language, C is often used for creating large, complicated programs (such as operating systems and word processors) along with more exotic programs (like antivirus utilities or disk diagnostic programs).
The efficiency of C
A C compiler tends to create smaller, faster, more efficient programs than compilers for other programming languages. The reason is that the C language is much simpler and, thus, easier to translate into equivalent machine language commands.
What makes the C language simpler is its small number of commands or keywords. Keywords are special commands used in every programming language. The more keywords a programming language uses, the fewer commands you need to make the computer do something. The fewer keywords a programming language offers, the more commands you need to make the computer do something.
A programming language with a lot of keywords allows you to write a program with fewer commands. That’s great from the programmer’s point of view but inefficient from the computer’s point of view.
The more keywords used in a language, the more work the compiler needs to do to translate all these keywords into machine language. As a result, programs written in languages that use a lot of keywords tend to run much slower than programs written in C.
A C program compiles to smaller, more efficient machine language commands because instead of offering a large number of keywords, the C language offers just a handful of keywords. This makes it easy for a compiler to translate the limited number of keywords into machine language.
However, as a programmer, you need to use C’s limited number of keywords to create subprograms that mimic the built-in commands of other programming languages. Because this can be impractical, the C language often includes libraries of subprograms that mimic the built-in commands of other programming languages.
The bottom line is that C programs tend to run faster and more efficiently than equivalent programs written in other programming languages. So, if you need speed, efficiency, and access to the computer hardware, the C language is the most popular choice.
The portability of C
By using much fewer commands than most programming languages, the C language makes it easy to create compilers that can translate a C program into machine language. Because it’s so much easier to create C compilers than it is to create compilers for other programming languages, you can find a C compiler for nearly every computer and operating system.
Theoretically, this means it’s possible to take a C program, written on Windows, copy it to another computer and operating system, and run that program on a different operating system, like Linux or macOS, with little or no modifications. When you can copy and run a program on multiple computers and operating systems, the program and the language it’s written in are portable.
So, not only does C create small, fast, and efficient programs, but C also allows you to copy and run your program on different operating systems and computers. Given all these advantages, the C language remains popular despite its age (it was created in 1972).
Adding object-oriented programming with C++
Although the C programming language is popular, it’s not perfect. When object-oriented programming became popular for designing and maintaining large programs, computer scientists created an object-oriented version of C called C++.
Because more people are writing and organizing large programs with object-oriented programming, more programs are being written in C++. Some people study C so they can understand the peculiarities of the C language. When they feel comfortable with C, they start studying C++ and object-oriented programming.
Other people just skip C and start studying C++ right away. The theory is that as a professional programmer, you’ll probably wind up writing and modifying C++ programs anyway, so you may as well study C++ from the start. After you know C++, you pretty much know enough to teach yourself how to write and modify C programs, too.
Gaining true portability with Java
Although C and C++ programs are supposed to be portable — you can copy and run them on other computers — they’re not really. Sometimes you have to make minor changes to get a C/C++ program to run on another computer, but more often, you have to make major changes.
That’s why Sun Microsystems created the Java programming language. Like C++, Java is also based on the C language, but it includes several features to make Java programs safer than C or C++ programs. Specifically, Java isolates the programmer from directly accessing the computer’s memory. This reduces the power of Java somewhat but translates into safer programs that (hopefully) won’t crash as often as C/C++ programs do.
Perhaps the most important feature of Java is its portability. Rather than try to compile a Java program into machine language for different types of processors, Java compiles Java programs into an intermediate file format called bytecode or pseudocode (also called
