The Reason Why C Programming Language Was Named C

The first thing that comes to our mind for the term programming language is C. It is a decade old general-purpose high-level programming language which has defied all norms of popularity. The language has been given the name C because it succeeds another language called B.

Cis one of the most popular computer programming languages which has existed since the last 44 years. It was created by the famous American programmer Dennis Ritchie – with the help of Ken Thompson – while working at Bell Labs. Most of us have this curiosity that why is the programming language named after a single alphabet. And why it is C, not any other letter. Anyways, we would have questioned the name of the programming language even if a different letter was used. So, let’s focus on the story instead.

The naming of C doesn’t involve any crunchy fiction story, like in the case the Linux Penguin Tux. It is said Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, contracted penguinitis after a man-eating penguin running at 100-miles per hour attacked him.

Because C comes after B

The reason why the language was named “C” by its creator was that it came after B language. Back then, Bell Labs already had a programming language called “B” at their disposal. The B language, a high-level language created by Thompson, was itself an implementation of the programming language BCPL designed by Martin Richards of Cambridge University.

The Unix operating system was originally created at Bell Labs by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others. It was implemented on the PDP-7 (manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1965) computer using the assembly language. Later, Unix was ported to PDP-11 using assembly language but the developers thought about rewriting it using B language.

The B language fell short of abilities to take benefit of the features offered by the newer member of the PDP series, the PDP-11. That’s when Dennis Ritchie started working on a new high-level programming language taking clues from B language. C had a great influence on the Unix operating system. In fact, most of the Unix system including a big part of its kernel is now available in C language.

C has been improved from time to time since its initial release. That’s the reason it’s still a part of the curriculum in many schools around the world and it is the 2nd popular programming language. The language has been an inspiration to many other programming languages like C++, C#, Java, PHP, etc.

If you have something to add, tell us in the comments below.

29 Highest Paying Programming Languages You Need To Learn In 2017

Willing to learn new software skills and programming languages in 2017? Well, you’re at the right place. According to a career website, skills with lower job openings rank higher on the list of the highest paying programming languages. While Languages like Objective-C, Scala, and Go help one rake in big bucks, evergreen languages like SQL, Java, and C++ continue to create a large number of jobs.

Recently, we told you about the 20 highest paying software skills for developers. Based on the data from the job site Indeed, this showed favorable conditions for software engineers with the knowledge of cloud-based skills. Overall, Amazon Web Services like DynamoDB and MapReduce turned out to be the winner.

Different career-focused websites keep conducting surveys, collecting industry data, and publishing them on their blogs. Recently, I came across a post by the Paysa Blog, which was named Silicon Valley’s Most Valuable Skills.

I found that blog pretty interesting, particularly the coverage of the highest paying programming languages.

The website has listed the highest paying programming languages by average salary and percentage of job vacancies demanding that language. The chart shared below accounts 29 different programming languages. Before examining the details, let’s take a look

This chart clearly shows one trend — the highly compensated skills are listed on the lesser number of job openings. If we think for a moment and apply the universal demand-and-supply principle, this makes sense.

Objective-C, a programming language that’s slowly being replaced by Apple’s open source Swift programming language, appeared on less than 2% listings. It manages to offer developers and engineers a $140,000 annual salary.

The same trend is observed when we look at Verilog, R, and Scala. Strictly salary-wise, here’s the top 15 list:

Highest paying programming languages

1. Verilog
2. Scala
3. Scheme
4. Objective-C
5. R
6. Perl
7. Go
8. Python
9. C++
10. C
11. Ruby
12. LaTeX
13. Java
14. MATLAB
15. Flex

All 29 languages, along with their position listings, can be seen in the chart shared above.

If we take a look at the position listings, we’ll find that SQL leads the chart, followed by Java, JavaScript, C#, and C++. Being the most in-demand language across all job postings, SQL was one of the lowest compensated languages.

Did you find this article interesting? Which languages do you wish to learn in 2017? Feel free to share your views in the comments section below

How To Pick Your First Programming Language (4 Different Ways)

Learning coding from scratch could be a tough task and it could take years of hard work to master a language. So here I am going to address the biggest problem a beginner faces: How to pick up my first programming language?

Recently I came across with a very enriching infographic that addressed the same question. Udacity has utilized the date of the top ten programming languages in the US (provided by IEEE Spectrum) to pick the best programming language for you as a beginner.

The basis on which this infographic is made varies from location, your lifestyle and the potential growth in career after selecting that particular language.

Based on the flexibility, Python or C++ comes first as it allows you work on the variety of fields such as gaming to making of embedded systems. JS or PHP prepares you for a web development career. Similar observations and trends are made based on the average pay per year, geography and popularity.

Take a look at the infographic below:

Did you find this infographic helpful? Share this article with your friends.

How to Clear Your Terminal History on Linux or macOS

Press the “up” arrow in the Mac or Linux command line and you’ll see the last command you ran. Keep pressing “up” and you’ll see more commands; you can go back days, months, or even years.

This is called your history, and it’s very convenient. If you made a mistake typing a long command, simply press “up” and fix the problem. If you want to re-connect to an SSH server you used the other day, simply press “up” until you see the relevant command.

It’s useful, but there’s also a potential security problem here, particularly if you accidentally typed a password in plain text at some point. How does one clear this history? Long story short, you can do so with two commands: history -c, followed by rm ~/.bash_history. Here’s what those commands do, for greater clarity.

Clear the Current Session’s History

Your history can be broke down into two chunks. There’s your current sessions’ history, and there’s your long-term history. Our first command, history -c, deals with the current session.

The history command is built into Bash itself, and the -c modifier tells the program to clear that history. This command will prevent anything in your current session from being written to your long-term history, but does not clear out that long-term history.

Clear All of Your Bash History

If you want to remove the entirety of your history, run the following command:

rm ~/.bash_history

If you don’t know, rm is a longstanding command for deleting files in UNIX-based systems. ~/.bash_history is a simple text document, which stores you Bash history.

Alternatively, you could open the file and delete any lines you’re concerned about. On a Mac, type open ~/.bash_history and your default text editor will open the file.

On Linux systems, replace open with the name of your preferred text editor, such as nano, vim, or gedit. One you’ve opened the file, you can delete any lines you’d rather not keep by hand. Save the file, then restart your shell, and the lines you’ve deleted will stop showing up.

Clear Your Terminal for a Like-New Session

This one is mostly unrelated, but I’m mentioning it anyway. The command clear makes your Terminal look like you just opened a new session, which is useful if you take a lot of screenshots and want things to look tidy (or don’t want people over your shoulder to see what commands you’ve been running.)

This is entirely aesthetic: scroll up and you’ll still see your previous output. But if you’re in my line of work, it comes in handy.