C

My favourite programming language is C.

Why? Because it offers power to the programmer, yet the code is not so hard as to be difficult to read. And of course, if the programmer includes comments, then source codes become all the more easier to read.


I even had a copy of the book "The C Programming Language", by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie (the guys who came up with C).

I wrote my JC computer project in C. It was a simple database program that allowed me to manage my Magic: The Gathering card collection. I didn't try doing graphics, sticking to a text screen interface, because back then, graphics was still quite complex in C, quite unlike the ease which it can be done in BASIC.

I also had to use it for my micromouse competition, which required participants to program the micromouse using C and a set of special-purpose libraries.

And when I got to university, the lessons on C were a piece of cake, since I was already very familiar with it, while the rest of the class was struggling. In the end, I took an advanced module in C programming, and managed to develop a program to solve the 0-1 knapsack problem using less than 200 lines of C code.

Sad to say, my thesis was done in Java, which was the language of choice for my professor, who was into artificial intelligence. But since Java is quite similar to C, I managed to pick up Java in a very short time, and produced an application that I used for my thesis research. Of course, given a choice, I would have wanted to do it in C.

I am still very interested in programming, just that I don't have ideas on what to make.


Some C implementations:
GNU Compiler Collection
Cygwin
MinGW
Dev-C++ (this is an IDE)
wxDev-C++ (this is an improvement of Dev-C++)
DJGPP
LCC
LCC-Win