Computer Languages Form an Ecosystem

(This is a copy of an article I posted on slashdot on March 15th, in response to a discussion titled C Alive and Well Thanks to Portable.NET. Many posters argued that the C language is dead. I add my response here, because one month after its original slashdot submission, I am still getting web site hits from it.)

Judging from some previous comments, I see that some fail to grasp that modern computer languages form a large ecosystem. Each language has its purpose, and one can not easily dismiss a language as dead, just because some other, ostensibly more powerful, language has appeared on the block. Monkeys, whales, cockroaches, ants, and plants continue to coexist with humans.

When I want to solve a program I choose the language I will use, taking into account the abstractions and facilities it offers.

• I chose Java when I wanted to leverage the javadoc applets (doclets) to convert a Java-like syntax into UML with my UMLgraph tool.
• I chose C++ to implement the CScout refactoring browser for C programs. In this case I wanted rich and efficient data structures, with minimal speed and space overhead. CScout datasets can require more than 1GB of RAM, and runtimes can span more than a day; any overhead of object boxing, garbage collection, or bytecode interpretation would in this case be unacceptable.
• I chose Perl to
  • Convert digital photographs and GPS track logs into annotated photo albums and trip maps
  • Examine the availability of 4500 URLs cited in computer science research papers.
  • Create the diagrams and the index for my book Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective.
  In all the above cases, I needed a typeless language with a rich set of operators, functions, and libraries to minimize the time I would spend to convert my ideas into code. Ruby and Python would have served me equally well.
• Finally, I chose C to write
  • the *BSD sed implementation.
  • The socketpipe zero-overhead network pipe tool.
  • The Outwit Windows-Unix shell integration tool suite.
  • The fileprune backup file prune utility.
  • A device driver for interfacing with my home's alarm system.
  In these cases, I did not require any fancy data structures or framework APIs, but I did want tight integration with the underlying system, absolute efficiency, and minimum-fuss portability. For code that will be executed billions of times on tens of thousands of systems, spending some additional effort to provide the absolute efficiency and reasonable portability that are possible in C, is a proposition one should take into account.

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