C

A lot of people see C as the most influential programming language ever. It’s hard to argue with that, given how pivotal C has been to C++, C#, Objective C, Java, Python, JavaScript, and many other languages you’ll find below. All those languages borrowed many basic features from C (especially its control structures). C was the first language to work on a higher level, opening the door for the development of complex software with significantly less knowledge.

C (, as in the letter c) is a general-purpose, procedural computer programming language supporting structured programming, lexical variable scope, and recursion, with a static type system. By design, C provides constructs that map efficiently to typical machine instructions.