According to its primary developer, Dennis Ritchie:
The C programming language was devised in the early 1970s as a system implementation language for the nascent Unix operating system. Derived from the typeless language BCPL, it evolved a type structure; created on a tiny machine as a tool to improve a meager programming environment, it has become one of the dominant languages of today.The language was standardized in 1989 ("C89"), and then most recently in 1999 ("C99"). The full set of C99 extensions isn't supported on a lot of platforms, although the popular GNU C compiler, GCC, does support a large portion of C99. C is known as a systems programming language, often derided and/or praised as a "portable assembler" for its closeness to the machine. It has strong language support for bitwise operations and text output (printf is so useful it's been implemented in many later languages), and is weakly typed. C's philosophy is portability and simplicity. It has no language support for graphics, sound, keyboard input, or anything beyond what the average glass-teletype system would provide. It even has no native "string" data type: it uses arrays of char for that purpose. C's higher-level descendants include C++ and Java.