To C or not to C

It has been a long time since I did some serious programming. My first venture was programming in BASIC when computers were introduced in standard VII in 1987. I learnt programming in BASIC first on BBC Micro and then later graduated to PC-AT. When I went to the engineering school, I was introduced to FORTRAN and as C was being considered the language to learn and use, I developed and enthusiasm for the language. I did some programming using C and then tried migrating to C++ while I was at IISc. However, for most of my programming needs, C sufficed and the only aspect of C++ in my programs were the friendlier input and output commands - the cin and cout. I found these easier than the scanf and printf commands in C. Another useful thing was the much easier dynamic memory allocation in C++ rather than the malloc.


Then came Matlab and I started using it for most of my assignment needs. It was quick, easy and the recommended software for all computation needs during my master's course.

When I joined Infosys, I was trained as a software engineer in the open systems and I went through a rigorous course in C.

Since then I have done some programming as a hobby and mostly in my ++ version of C. Recently I tried my hand on Java as well.

Yesterday, I was reading the 'Mechanical Engineering', the ASME publication. It reported that the choice of programming languages to be taught at the graduate level was hot and highly debated. FORTRAN is out of curriculum at most places, replaced mostly by Matlab. C or C++ seem to be the languages of choice. University of Calfornia, Davis, has created a new course that teaches the budding engineers C and Matlab.