Why are C and C++ so popular and widely-used?
(First part of answer adapted from a March 1998 comp.lang.c post by Kaz Kylheku on “Why Has C Proved To Be Such A Succesful Language”) C has always been a language that never attempts to tie a programmer down – it allows for easy implementation, it comes with a genuinely useful standard library that can itself be implemented in C, and it is both efficient and portable. C has always appealed to systems programmers who like the terse, concise manner in which powerful expressions can be coded. C was widely distributed with an Operating System (Unix) that was actually largely written in C itself. Also, C allowed programmers to (while sacrificing portability) have direct access to many machine-level features that would otherwise require the use of Assembly Language. As Dennis Ritchie writes in his paper, “The Development of the C Language”, C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success. While accidents of history surely helped, it evidently satisfied a need for a system implementation langua
