One of my latest projects, MailTemplate, provides a serious challenge. I have to wrangle a mix of Objective-C, C and C++ into Universal Binary format by Macworld in San Francisco next year, hopefully.

It has been years since I did any serious C programming. As I contemplate the mountain of work this is going to be, a thought keeps crossing my mind.

Why is C so popular? I understand the long standing entrenched interests and legacy code argument. However with today’s lightning fast computers, the speed argument is quickly fading for most common applications.

I am amazed every time I see yet another implementation of an Array or Dictionary class which falls miles short of Ruby, Python or even Java in most cases.

How many decades before it is replaced with a higher level, more productive language?

How many times do we have to build the wheel?

Thankfully my other projects are based the joyful Ruby and Ruby on Rails.