C is cool, but

waffle: “C has dominated programming for the last 35 years. Anyone who says differently is lying or work on Sun’s or Microsoft’s marketing team. One of the first properties I assess of a new programming language is ‘how easy is it to drop into C’?”

Daniel Jalkut asks if C is the new assembly.

Here’s a small data point: I love C. Absolutely adore it. Really. I’m a total freak—I think pointers are cool and I don’t mind at all doing memory management. I fantasize about writing apps entirely in C. That makes me an outlier, a real weird freakazoid.

However, I’ve been quite happy with Objective-C, and I suspect I’ll be even happier still with higher-level languages, using C and Objective-C only when needed for specific features and performance issues.

So it is with reluctance that I agree that C is becoming the new assembly. It’s not like I hate it—quite the opposite. (A well-written C app is a thing of beauty, by the way. Even though C isn’t object-oriented, you can still use object-oriented techniques. You can build things in such a way that most of the time you work at a very high level, only rarely dropping down into lower layers of your app.)

The upshot for me is that, well, I’m learning Ruby. ;) As much as I love C, I’ve always loved scripting, too.