My first programming language was QBasic. That’s where it all started: those first programs full of curiosity and excitement to see what a computer could do with just a few lines of code. But if I’m being honest, the language I’ve enjoyed the most is C. There’s something special about it: that feeling of powerful simplicity and elegance, where everything just works perfectly (if you don’t mess up your pointers).
Do you remember your first computer? I do. It was a glorious 386 with 33 MHz and 4 MB of RAM. Yes, 4 MB. And it worked wonderfully! I still remember when my friend Jason Aviles upgraded his PC back in 1998: from 16 MB of RAM to 80 MB. My jaw dropped. “80 megabytes of RAM? 😱 That’s insane!”
To put it into perspective, my current, ehem, 32 GB of RAM is 400 times more than those 80 MB. And yet, here I am, watching my browser struggle not to freeze when I open too many tabs (I do that every day, to be honest). How did we get here?
Meanwhile, C remains that old friend that can do so much with so little. It’s the language that taught me that doing things well isn’t always easy, it takes effort, and that’s okay.
I still remember when I spent hours writing my own version of Tetris in C, painfully drawing each block and shape for the “graphics mode”. Activating the graphics mode itself was a small challenge, requiring just the right lines of code, starting with #include <graphics.h> and following with initgraph(…).
Once the screen flickered into life, the real work began. Drawing the blocks, moving them across the screen—it felt like magic. Later, I even built my own set of UI widgets (labels, input boxes, buttons) to create an invoice application. It wasn’t pretty 🫣 (by today standards), but it worked! Those hours of coding taught me not just logic but also patience and persistence.
In today’s world dominated by JavaScript, Python, and web frontends, APIs, and data science, I sometimes wonder, with nostalgia: is there still room for C?
I sometimes think there is. In fact, I believe the world could benefit immensely from rediscovering what C stands for. How much could we save in efficiency and energy if more systems were written with C’s minimalist approach? After all, we hear a lot about the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies, but who talks about the hidden energy costs of high-level languages and our increasingly demanding apps?
C isn’t dead. It just needs a little more love.
If this resonates with you, share your story: What was your first programming language? What is your most memorable or painful experience with it? Have you tried revisiting it after years of using modern high-level languages?
(And if you ever coded on a 386 with 4 MB of RAM, or less, you have my eternal respect).
C: The Old Friend We Forgot to Appreciate
