International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Emerging Paradigms of Information and Communication Technologies and its Impact on Society (EPICTIS-2014) 11 A Tribute to C Programming Language: History and Modern Applications Priya Tyagi MCA Student Department of IT Institute of Technology and Science (ITS), Mohan Nagar, Ghaziabad (UP), India Chandra Mani Sharma Assistant Professor Department of IT Institute of Technology and Science (ITS), Mohan Nagar, Ghaziabad (UP), India ABSTRACT C was first developed in 1972. It is now more than four decades since C programming has been popular among coders. C is said to be the mother of all modern programming languages and it paved the evolutionary way for various other modern programming languages such as C++, Java etc. C has a plenty of unique features that make it suitable for developing various applications in modern days too. This paper presents a chronological transformation of C language and discusses the niches of application development where it is still being used. There are various Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Libraries such as OpenCv, which are being used in modern day research and application development. General Terms Computer, Hardware, Programming Languages, Software Development etc Keywords Computer Programming, C, C++, Development in Modern Age, Swift, Hak etc. 1. INTRODUCTION Hundreds of programming languages have succeeded C since its development in year 1972. Day in day out, new programming languages are appearing on the surface of software development. Interestingly, tens of programming languages have been developed in last 4-5 years and it becomes even more interesting to learn that in year 2014 itself, two new languages have been developed namely, Swift (introduced on 2nd June, 2014) and Hack (introduced on 20th March 2014). These two new languages seek more attention as they have been proposed by two giants of IT industry- Apple and Facebook. Swift is created by Apple and shares its genesis with Objective C but with some refined features. Hack programming language is created by popular social networking site company Facebook. Hack is identical to PHP but with fair dissimilarities. Table 1 presents the details of new programming languages developed in last five years i.e. during year 2010 to 2014. The fact of the matter is that 12 new significant programming languages have been created during the mentioned period. These programming languages come with some predefined objectives regarding application development such as web applications, mobile device applications, embedded applications etc. Markstrum[1] presents a historical review of various programming languages till 2010. His work mentions the impetus factors for developing new programming languages from a very early time. Kernighan & Ritchie [2], the developers of C, had a remarkable contribution in the modern evolution of programming languages. Then comes the contribution of Strousstrap[3], the developer of C++, who transmuted C in C++ with inclusion of object oriented features such as class, object, encapsulation, polymorphism and abstraction. The modern day research in the field of developing new programming languages aims at addressing new issues and avenues of application development such as embedded systems, mobile applications, responsive interface development etc[4-8]. Further, recent advancements in the field of procedural programming and their evolution have been discussed in detail in [9] and [10]. Table 1: Some of the new programming languages developed in last five years (2010-2014) S.N. Year Language Developer(s) Genesis 1 2014 Hack Facebook PHP 2 2014 Swift Apple Inc. C, Objective-C 3 2012 Elixir José Valim Erlang, Ruby 4 2012 TypeScript Anders Hejlsberg, Microsoft JavaScript, CoffeeScript 5 2012 Julia Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Viral Shah, Alan Edelman MATLAB 6 2011 Ceylon Gavin King, Red Hat Java 7 2011 Dart Google Java, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, Go 8 2011 Elm Evan Czaplicki Haskell, Standard ML, OCaml 9 2011 Red Nenad Rakocevic Rebol, Scala, Lua 10 2010 Chapel Brad Chamberlain, Cray Inc. HPF, ZPL 11 2010 RPG Open Access IBM FARGO, RPG, 12 2010 Rust Graydon Hoare, Mozilla Alef, C++, Camlp4, Common Lisp, Erlang, C seems to be a strange name for a programming language but this strange sounding language is one of the most popular computer languages today because it is a structured, high- level, and portable language. The root of all structured programming languages is ALGOL introduced in 1960s that first used block structure. C is a programming language developed at AT & T’s Bell Laboratories of USA in 1972. It