Hi John > Because of my 'novice-ness' in programming, I had always thought that C > was replaced by C++ and wasn't really used anymore today. I know that's > not the case at all now, but I'm still curious how much C is used > anymore in programming today, and what purpose it serves.
There is a whole spectrum of 'mixing' between features of C ans C++ used today in the industry and thats o.k. if it just works. You cal write plain C in a C++ environment, mix some C++ features to your otherwise plain C and so on - as you like. You can't compare C/C++'industrial use w/Python's in todays Software production - there is no match. A recent 580+ people survey (O'Reilly) brought up the following: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/12/02/onlamp_survey_results.html?page=2 "The Dice" (find tech jobs) has offerings (last 7 days, U.S. + unrestricted) for: *SQL 14,322 C/C++ 11,968 Java 10,143 ... Perl 3,332 PHP 730 *Python* 503 Fortran 119 Ruby 108 open*gl 66 That is what the industry looks for. You understand the ratios? > ... Is it used for > actual application programming, or is its use more for something like > extending Python? Would it help for a newbie to learn C for any reason? It is used for almost everything, from - Programming the Python Language itself, - Programming the Perl Language itself, - Programming the PHP language and others, to - complete Applications, as you said. It *is* somehow 'wordy' (especially C), but don't underestimate its power in the hands of a master ;-) There is a huge amount of highly functional libraries for almost everything too. Regards, M. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
