I’ve been using C for my classes and I can’t help but be really really happy about that. I’ve played with C before. Actually C was my first language. I tried learning it as a stepping stone to Objective C and iOS development, but I quickly gave it up after getting to pointers and arrays. Granted I was like 11. After that, I played with C in various places. First I had to use C++ in an internship, where I got to play around with performance optimization and profiling. Then last year because I was bored with using Java in my classes, I started to write some data structures in C. Just basic stuff like linked lists, binary trees, maybe a hash table. I found it really intriguing and a lot of fun to play with. Oh sure—segfaults were annoying and the whole lack of decent typing or safety led to some less than safe code. But overall it was a good experience.

This semester, I’m in Computer Systems Organization, a class with a lot of C programming. And I’m having the time of my life. C is just such a cool language. Oh sure, it doesn’t have the fancy features of Python/Ruby, the metaprogramming of Lisp or the libraries of JavaScript. But it’s just so damn minimal. I’ve been trying to learn about compilers and language development (albeit at a glacial pace, I do have other things in my life) and C is just such an intriguing language from a design standpoint.

Like take lexical scoping. C doesn’t allow you to declare functions in functions. The best you can get are function pointers. But as a result, functions and their lexical scope map cleanly onto stack frames. You don’t have to worry about closures or about resolving scope dynamically. Hell, you can’t call functions before they’re declared, forcing you to use header files. This means that the map from code to implementation is just about the simplest thing. You can resolve scope just by looking at the code. And that’s so damn cool.

Or how you can count memory allocations. High level languages are nice and all, but you often run into awkward situations where one line of code is mysteriously and disproportionately slowing down your program. In C? Not so much. Oh sure, malloc is amortized and can be slower than you expect. But generally when you’re writing C, you know what you’re getting. In a language like Ruby or Python or JavaScript, I can’t tell you how many bytes I’ve allocated. Hell, I probably wouldn’t even get within 100 bytes of the right answer. But in C? I could probably tell you down to plus or minus 2 bytes.

Of course, there’s plenty of annoying issues, not to mention the whole concept of memory safety. But it’s probably the most fun I’ve had just programming, barring messing around with Lisps. Now if only I could find a good project to write in C…