C-Family Programming - College Homework Help and Online Tutoring
The C family of programming languages are rivaled only by Java in their popularity. In 2014, the C family (that is C, C++ and C#) had a combined market share of 27.3% to Java’s 19.3%[1] Considering this, you will almost certainly learn one or the other in your college or university, and many software professionals have had successful careers specialising in the C family. The oldest of the languages, C, was designed by Dennis Ritchie in 1972.[2] It has been a mainstay of operating system and low level application programming for decades. It is what is known as an imperative language, which means a program is made up of functions that execute in a linear progression, with each one changing some state of the program. For example, a line of code may add a number to another in memory, display a certain value on screen, or write a value to a file on disk. Programs are structured with “if” statements which fork the execution path of a program into multiple directions, or loops, which repeat operations until a condition is met. Complex data structures can be implemented, but in a more crude form than in C++ or C#, and the key factor is that the functions always take and manipulate these data structures, rather than exist as a part of them. C++ moves us away from this paradigm into the Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) world. In OOP, the data structures we once knew are objects capable of their own actions.[3] Commonly encountered examples in university tutorials are things such as a car, which would have methods (the actions) such as driving or changing gears. Instead of having a central program that operates on data structures, the data structures themselves gain some level of independence through what’s known as ‘encapsulation’. This allows program objects to hide their internal workings and instead provide publically accessible interfaces – rather than setting the location on the aforementioned car, we must call the drive function to direct it where to go. This allows the object to keep a consistent internal state and only allow other objects in the system to have as much knowledge about each other as is needed to perform their function, and never enough to break the functionality of another object.[4] Understanding this key aspect which differentiates C++ from C is crucial in becoming confident and competent with C++ and more modern programming languages as a whole. C# is the last member of the traditional C family of languages (although Apple/iOS-focused Objective C has its place too) and is usually only considered in association with Microsoft’s .Net framework.[5] Syntactically C# can be viewed as just a cleaner version of C++, and although it introduces a lot of modern programming language quirks, it is less of a departure from C++ than C++ was from C. The .Net framework, on the other hand, provides easy to use tools to build Windows applications of all types, including desktop applications, web applications, web services, Windows services and Microsoft Office plugins. This is essentially what drives the market share in C#. The language has been improved significantly to modernise C++ to rival Java, as well. Memory management is no longer the responsibility of the programmer, as the application is run within what’s known as managed execution, which resembles Java’s virtual machine.[6] This attempts to handle one of the most common problems with C and C++ applications, which was improper memory usage leading to applications that become slower and more resource-heavy during their lifecycle. This is but an overview of one of the largest and most feature-rich programming languages in the field of computer programming, but it touches on some of the most important fundamentals you will have to learn on your journey to becoming a software developer. Indeed, you will encounter most of these concepts again and again regardless of which language you learn, so even if you don’t plan to make a career out of C programming, knowing these core concepts will stand you in good stead.