C# 0 The Complete Reference

C: The Beginning of the Modern Age of Programming

The creation of C marks the beginning of the modern age of programming. C was invented 

by Dennis Ritchie in the 1970s on a DEC PDP-11 that used the UNIX operating system. 

While some earlier languages, most notably Pascal, had achieved significant success, C 

established the paradigm that still charts the course of programming today.

C grew out of the 

structured programming

 revolution of the 1960s. Prior to structured 

programming, large programs were difficult to write because the program logic tended to 

degenerate into what is known as “spaghetti code,” a tangled mass of jumps, calls, and 

returns that is difficult to follow. Structured languages addressed this problem by adding 

well-defined control statements, subroutines with local variables, and other improvements. 

Through the use of structured techniques programs became better organized, more reliable, 

and easier to manage.

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Although there were other structured languages at the time, C was the first to successfully 

combine power, elegance, and expressiveness. Its terse, yet easy-to-use syntax coupled with 

its philosophy that the programmer (not the language) was in charge quickly won many 

converts. It can be a bit hard to understand from today’s perspective, but C was a breath of 

fresh air that programmers had long awaited. As a result, C became the most widely used 

structured programming language of the 1980s.

However, even the venerable C language had its limits. One of the most troublesome 

was its inability to handle large programs. The C language hits a barrier once a project 

reaches a certain size, and after that point, C programs are difficult to understand and 

maintain. Precisely where this limit is reached depends upon the program, the programmer, 

and the tools at hand, but there is always a threshold beyond which a C program becomes 

unmanageable.