C is not a dead programming language, and it should seriously be considered a prime candidate for a new programming language to lean by any who do not already know it. This was my presentation for SpringBeta 2013.

1. CC (It's Not Quite Dead Yet)(It's Not Quite Dead Yet)
By Charles Southerland

2. “Differentlanguagessolvethesameproblemsin
differentways. BylearningseveraldifferentBylearningseveraldifferent
approaches,youcanhelpbroadenyourthinkingandapproaches,youcanhelpbroadenyourthinkingand
avoidgettingstuckinarut.avoidgettingstuckinarut.”
- The Pragmatic Programmer

3. You should try to
learn as many
different kinds of
programming
languages as
possible.

4. Dennis Ritchie
1941 - 2011

5. It has always been among the most commonly
used programming languages...

6. ...but it gets a lot of flack.

7. C's lack of automatic memory management and
lack of type safety often lead to memory issues.

8. Since the programmer frees their own memory,
there's no waiting for the garbage collector.

9. C doesn't have built-in strings, stacks, associative
arrays, iterators, garbage collection, etc.

10. C generally doesn't suffer from language-level
vulnerabilities (like the recent hash-collision
issues in Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc.)

11. Object-oriented programming in C can be clunky.

12. “Theproblemwithobject-orientedlanguagesisthey'vegotallthisimplicitenvironmentthattheycarryaroundwiththem.
Youwantedabananabutwhatyougotwasagorillaholdingthebananaandtheentirejungle.Youwantedabananabutwhatyougotwasagorillaholdingthebananaandtheentirejungle.”
- Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang

13. The lack of a nice OOP syntax makes GUI
programming in C a painful experience.

14. C's procedural syntax is just fine for markup.

15. C needs to be compiled.

16. C compilers have become very proficient at
optimizing code.

17. C isn't being used as much outside of embedded
and systems programming.

18. … But there's no reason it couldn't be.

19. Forty years of tools, documentation, libraries, and
best practices have to count for something, right?

20. The world around you runs on C.The world around you runs on C.
It is up to you to program that world.It is up to you to program that world.