1. Why Program in C?

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
  printf("hello world\n");
  return 0;
}

The above is a bare-bones C program that simply writes the string "hello world" to the screen. (The line numbers were added by me, they aren't a part of the actual C code.) As you can see it's not terribly scary looking code. The code that "does the work" here is line 4. All the other stuff you can think of as standard "boilerplate" C code that you need for any C program.

Line 1 imports one of the standard C libraries, stdio.h, (standard input/output). Line 3 defines a function called main(), which is needed for the program to run. The main code is line 4, which prints the string "hello world" (followed by a newline character \n) to the screen. The stuff inside the brackets in main() (the int argc, char *argv[]) is not important for now, and in fact it is optional, you could leave it out and your program would still run. Same for line 5, return 0;. I included them here for completeness, and we will talk about their role later on.

As a comparison here is a similar program in Python:

print "hello world"

Here it is in R:

cat("hello world\n")

and Matlab / Octave:

disp('hello world')

As you can see the difference between the C code and the code in other languages is that in C we have to explicitly import the stdio.h library, and we have to explicitly define the main() function. Not such a big deal. The other difference is that the name of the standard function to write stuff to the screen is different in each langauge. In C it is printf(), in Python it is print, in R it is cat(), and in Matlab/Octave it is disp(). Again, no big deal.

One of the things I want you to take away from this boot camp is that with few exceptions, all (procedural) programming languages are essentially the same, but:

1. names of standard functions are different
2. rules of syntax are different
3. functionality included in standard libraries is different
4. APIs are different and use different names for things

That's it, really. Once you know how to program in one language, all you have to do, really, is learn some different syntactic rules, and learn the names of the various functions that you will be using, and learn what APIs provide needed functionality. No big deal.

To see hello world in a bunch of other languages, go here: hello-world.

• fast (it's a compiled language and so is close to the machine hardware)
• portable (you can compile your program to run on just about any hardware platform out there)
• the language is small (unlike C++ for example)
• mature (a long history and lots of resources and experience available)
• there are many tools for making programming easier (e.g. IDEs like Xcode)
• you have direct access to memory
• you have access to low-level system features if needed

• the language is small (but there are many APIs)
• it's easy to get into trouble, e.g. with direct memory access & pointers
• the code — compile — test (crash) — debug cycle
• you must manage memory yourself
• sometimes code is more verbose than in high-level scripting languages like Python, R, etc

Imagine you write some Matlab code to read in data from one subject, process that data, and write the result to a file, and that operation takes 60 seconds. Is that so bad? Not if you only have to run it once. Now let's imagine you have 15 subjects in your group… now 60 seconds is 15 minutes. Now let's say you have 4 groups … now 15 minutes is one hour. You run your program, go have lunch, and come back an hour later and you find there was an error. You fix the error and re-run … another hour. Even if you get it right, now imagine your supervisor asks you to re-run the analysis 5 different ways, varying some parameter of the analysis (maybe filtering the data at a different frequency, for example). Now you need 5 hours to see the result. It doesn't take a huge amount of data to run into this sort of situation.

If you program your data processing pipeline in C, and you achieve a 100x speedup (not unusual), now those 5 hours turn into 180 seconds (you could run your analysis twice and it would still take less time than listening to Stairway to Heaven).