Importance of C Programming Language | State the importance of C language

Despite the familiarity of higher level languages, ‘C’ continues to be very popular among programmers. It is flexible, efficient, powerful, and widely available. ‘C’ has become the backbone of modern computing systems-operating systems, compilers, interpreters, databases, device driver programs etc.

Following are some of the major importance of ‘C’ language:

• C is a robust language, which has so many built-in functions, data types and operators can be used to write any complex program.
• Generally, we use to call ‘C’ as a middle level language. Because, the ‘C’ combines the features of both high-level and low-level languages. Therefore, it is best for writing both system software and application software.
• Programs written in ‘C’ are efficient due to several varieties of data types and powerful operators.
• C is highly portable, that is, ‘C’ programs written on one computer can be run on another with slight changes or no changes.
• ‘C’ language is best for structured programming, which allows a complex program to be broken into simpler programs called functions or modules. A collection of these modules make a program debugging and testing easier.  
• ‘C’ language has the ability to extend itself.  A ‘C’ program is basically a collection of functions, which is supported by the ‘C’ library. We can add our own functions to the library with the availability of large number of functions.
• ‘C’ has a strong set of built-in functions. This facilitates the reusability of code. That is, when we a make a set of programs for a primitive task then it can be made available to other users in the form of a library. This ensures that other developers need not write those routines all over again. This is referred to as software reusability. Thereby the man hours involved in developing large systems is reduced.
• ‘C’ is used to develop system software as it has many low level functions embedded in it. The operating system interacting features of ‘C’ are extremely handy, when system software is developed. In fact, system programmers will feel at home when a system work is being developed under ‘C’.
• Managing memory and other resources can be achieved through ‘C’. There is no need to depend on the machine dependent assembly language. In fact, this is what was demonstrated in UNIX by writing the operating system code in ‘C’.