'C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success' Quote of the day by the creator of the programming language Dennis Ritchie
Date:
Wed, 12 Aug 2026 22:00:00 +0000
Description:
One of the software industry's leading lights gave his take on the foundational programming language that he created
FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter First released in 1972, the general-purpose programming language C is one of the most important in the history of computing and underpins many of the modern systems that we use daily. Its creator, the late Dennis Ritchie, laid the foundations for much of the world's technical infrastructure in his early work, and C was a major element of his contribution. "C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success. While accidents of history surely helped, it evidently satisfied a need for a system implementation language efficient enough to displace assembly
language, yet sufficiently abstract and fluent to describe algorithms and interactions in a wide variety of environments." Dennis Ritchie, March 1993 Laying foundations Ritchie summarized the history and impact of the programming language he pioneered while working at Bell Labs in a history paper that he presented in 1993. Quote of the day This article is part of TechRadar Pro's QOTD project to provide an insight into the minds of the brightest and most recognized figures in the technology industry today and in years gone by. Read the full series here . His comments describing C highlighted its strange syntax, confusing declarations, and minimal rules
base as evidence of its quirkiness. The flaws, meanwhile, arose in the fact that there were no built-in bounds for checking memory, with bugs frequently leading to crashes, alongside some small errors that led compilers to act in unpredictable ways. Latest Videos From TechRadar Watch full video here:
However, the success of C is unquestionable, with the language running fast and mapping well to chips, and the language finding itself at the heart of many widely used operating systems including Unix, Windows and Linux. The evolution of language Ritchie's C was also the precursor to a host of more modern languages including C++, Objective-C, Java, C#, PHP, JavaScript, and Go. Categorized as being under the 'C family', these languages inherit the basic syntax structures, but each will have its own use case and
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Despite C being firmly established in the programming hall of fame, it's no longer the world's most popular programming language.
A global index on the most used programming languages shows C in 11th
position as of November 2025, with JavaScript taking top spot as the most
used language among developers, followed by HTML/CSS, SQL, and Python. Are
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