Hi All,

I have been observerving a declining trend in use and learning of C among new software engineers.
Newer languages (Java) and more are gaining a foot hold.
People are getting used to more user friendly environments.

I was just thinking will C die out ? Forget legacy code problem.
Eventually Pascal and Fortran dried up despite million programs.

Want to know your opinion on this.

thanks,
Amit Jain

I am leaning toward taking my advanced programming class in C#... although once you learn one transitioning to another high level language is not too difficult, so I've heard...

>Newer languages (Java) and more are gaining a foot hold.
Yep, just try writing an operating system in Java.

>Eventually Pascal and Fortran dried up despite million programs.
They did?

C isn't going to die... at least not for a long time. Even if programs written in C were to almost completely diminish, you're still forgetting about the millions of applications that exist and have to be maintained.

And here's a thread that debunks a Slashdot article that mentions the same things that you have in this thread:
http://cboard.cprogramming.com/showthread.php?t=90195

Fortran isn't dead, at least not in the scientific/supercomputing community where it was intended to be used from the beginning.

Pascal lost members because it became obsolete with the intro of C++/Java and had no redeeming functionality.

C does have redeeming functionality because it is faster than both C++ and Java, is used as a metalanguage for writing other computer languages from, and has a wide base of support for writing hardware oriented programs.

Those usages will prevent C from dying anytime soon.


While there may be fewer application developers for C, competitions such as the FIRST Robotics Competition require high school students to write vast (thousands of lines) of code in C, guaranteeing that future generations will be proficient in C's uses.

Fortran and cobol still have like a 80% share of the mainframe market

How much are mainframes used anymore? (Serious question, I really have no idea...)

I know people who work for IBM and the answeer is that they are on the up.

All the massive mainframes of the 1950-80s are falling but all the smaller modern mainframes like the IBM zseries are increasing.

Well in India whose Railway network is most dense and massive in the whole world the Reservation system throughout the country uses Mainframes with Unix RISC servers. (Motorola RX000series dual server systems).

Many other places where you need extremely fast interface with least implemenatational cost Mainframes still Dominate.

when it comes to embedded nothing can beat C as it can create smallest and highly fucntional programs. Be it a small microcontroller to highly complex Avionics softwares all use C.

Actually a large amount of aircraft, nuclear, military and space systems use ADA.