Before C, What Did You Use? (.PDF Download)

Our recent Embedded Revolution survey reinforced the view of C and C++ dominance with embedded programmers (see figure), but the results also highlight the differences between the embedded space and others with respect to other programming languages in use. Assembler would not even be mentioned by other developers, plus MATLAB and LabVIEW would probably not hit the top 10.

I touch on this and other results ranging for artificial intelligence and machine learning to safety issues in my white paper, “Developers are Chasing AI, Open-Source, and Security Technologies.”

I thought it might be interesting to hear from some of those people who developed some of the other popular platforms highlighted in these results, since languages like C have changed over time. Since programming languages are not designed in isolation, I asked what other languages influence them, when they encountered C, and what they are working on now.