C was the first language I learned. In 1994 I got to visit a company building flight simulators and I asked them “How? What do you use to make this?!”. The answer I received was: “C”.
I had no idea what C was, so I hit the library and started reading with absolutely no plan or even any real understanding what I was looking at. Some months later I managed to get access to a dial-up FreeBSD shell which came with gcc. I wrote my hello.c. Buzzing with anticipating I entered gcc hello.c and… was treated to a new file: a.out! And then nothing. Because I couldn’t figure out how to run my newly compiled program. I spent the next few days at the library after school trying to find the crucial bit of missing information which was the answer to “HOW DO I RUN A PROGRAM ON UNIX??!!!”.
You see until this point I had only used DOS (and a bit of CP/M) to run some games and it was enough to just type the name of the thing to make it go brrrr! I simply was not prepared to understand the need for ./. And apparently every reference book assumed you knew this already because in this era most people learning C on FreeBSD were probably being mentored.
I don’t even remember how I eventually learned the trick. But thankfully I did learn what to do and managed to proceed learning how to make madlibs and all that fun stuff. And it wasn’t long after this that I discovered Rhide and DJGPP and engrossed myself in VGA.txt downloaded from usenet or something.
C is special to me even though I haven’t really started any project with it in 20 years or more. I’ve definitely maintained C programs, fixed some bugs, and replaced some old C with C++ and I’m ashamed to say also some Python.
So I’ve found it encouraging lately to actually see how much C is still making an impact everywhere. It’s just so load bearing. Thanks to people like Ryan Gordon, Evan Hemsley, JeanHeyd Meneide, Casey Muratori, Ryan Fluery, and countless others who keep the fire alive or continue to build great and useful things, or educate/remind everyone about the good still to be found in C, there is more to build on and learn from.
This was perhaps a lot of words just to echo a timeless sentiment.