DarkLordoftheMonkeys

It's extremely telling about the order in which you learned these. For you, C became a natural fit because it was imperative, and it emphasizes structural coding using functions, something Bash, sed, and awk don't emphasize nearly as much. Further, it's interesting to know that you had started earlier, noticeably prior to learning structured programming, trying to code using C++ and Java, which both very much emphasize OOP. I think I now understand a bit more, but also, I noticed something that you said.

Originally Posted by DarkLordoftheMonkeys

And you don't have to write 50+ lines of code to get something done.

On the contrary, higher level languages are designed precisely to perform the task of getting things done without writing 50+ lines of code to do it, and C is a notoriously verbose language when written properly. C was intended to be only one step up from Assembly, which is far from the dream of writing only a few lines of code to accomplish what you need to do. Consider this C program:

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

int load_file(char** addTo, FILE* file)
{
    char buffer[80], *contents = NULL;
    int csize = 0, bsize = 0;

    while(fgets(buffer, 80, file))
    {
        /* We're just going to realloc contents as necessary to fill addTo
           with the whole file. */
        char* addpoint, *temp;
        csize += (bsize = strlen(buffer));
        temp = contents;
        contents = (char*) realloc(contents, csize + 1);
        addpoint = &contents[csize - bsize];
        if (!contents)
        {
            *addTo = temp; /* It can be deallocated outside the function */
            fprintf(stderr, "Reallocation of contents buffer failed.");
            return -1;
        }
        memcpy(addpoint, buffer, bsize + 1);
    }
    *addTo = contents;

    return 0;
}

int main(void)
{
    FILE *f = fopen("test.c", "r");
    char *contents = NULL;
    if (load_file(&contents, f))
    {
        free(contents);
        return 1;
    }
    printf("%s\n", contents);
    return 0;
}

It's a simple C program that takes in the contents of a file and prints it out on the terminal. It's quite effective at this, and I am actually quite proud of that little function I devised since it is intended to load files completely and quite safely. It's also the smallest amount of source code I've been able to devise to perform such an operation, and I invite any other C programmers to attempt to improve it in safety and code size.

However, I also wrote this to compare it to the C++ version. Take a look at how C++ would do it:

Code:

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>

int main()
{
    using namespace std;

    string input;
    fstream f("test.cpp");
    if (!f.good()) return 1;
    getline(f, input, '\0');
    cout << input << endl;
    return 0;
}

This code will perform precisely the same task, and equally, if not moreso, safely. The function getline() is precisely the kind of function that allows for extremely simple, and safe, input. With the exception of having to deal with allocation issues (which is also the only problem the aforementioned C code would encounter), there's nothing that will really go wrong with getline (assuming you checked fstream::good() before that).

Of course, perhaps in your case I would say you should learn Python. Seriously. Here's the Python equivalent of the above program:

Code:

print(open("test.py").read())

Done.

From what you've described as how you like languages, I think Python would be a good fit for you. Yes, it is more "English-like", but really I see no detriment to that, in fact it's a great boon, and Python can be quite fast.