In the history of the embedded software industries, for the most part, developers writing software for microcontroller-based systems have had very few software languages to choose from. At the dawn of the computer age, developers were stuck using low-level assembly language that forced them to learn the instruction set for each microcontroller device that they used. While highly effective and efficient, reading, maintaining, or even understanding assembly language was quite difficult and cumbersome.
Between 1969 and 1973, Dennis Ritchie developed the C programming language while working at Bell Labs and forever changed the way that software was developed. The C programming language caught on, and while general-purpose computing systems have moved on to other object-oriented languages, C has been the dominant language to use with microcontrollers...
