Twelve years ago today, this blog had its first post. It’s been run consistently since, with new Lessons posted every Saturday and a new Exercise posted on the first of each month.
The blog was launched at the same time as my book Beginning Programming with C For Dummies. This book was updated in 2020 with the current title, C Programming For Dummies. The blog was active for a few months before it went live, just to ensure that plenty of material would be here for first-time visitors and that I could keep a schedule to maintain posts. (Many blogs die after one or two missed posts.)
The stats: This blog has 907 posts. By next year’s anniversary, it will have over 1,000.
I plan on continuing the blog, not only to support my books and my online training courses at LinkedIn Learning, but to keep my own C programming skills sharp. It amazes me every year, but I still find interesting things to write about in C programming. I’m always learning.
Thanks to all the subscribers as well. Your contributions not only help the blog be interesting, but they help me and others in furthering our understanding of one of the oldest, still active programming languages on the planet.
Quite impressive stats that you have racked up over those 12 years!
With JeanHeyd “ThePhD” Meneide (Project Editor for JTC1/SC22/WG14) and others pushing for faster release cycles—aiming for a 3 year release cycle instead of 10 years(?)—there shouldnʼt be a shortage of things to introduce in the years to come.
Letʼs just hope the ISO standards committee people donʼt overdo it by giving our favorite language™ a case of the featuritis…
I like the faster releases – and the improvements, which still don’t detract from the core language. What I don’t like is the sluggish implementation!
I donʼt know. I have been quite happy with the ~10-12 year release cycles we have had up until now. This gave newer standards some time to establish themselves on the market. With a shorter release cycle this will just lead to further fragmentation with regards to which versions of the Standard are actually used in companies.
Java is a good example of this: it took 21½ years to get from Java 1.0 (January 23, 1996) to Java 9 (21 September 2017); after that they switched to a 6 month release cycle, so 7½ years later we’re now at Java 24 (18 March 2025)—the following article contains a nice summary of all the language features added during this time.
Death by feature creep is a real danger for programming languages.
But, you’re right, we will see… I will try to stay optimistic!
You’ll soon need to use binary with lit and unlit candles.
A clever idea, Chris! Thanks.