<p>Have any of you materials engineering majors ever used C in any of your courses/research?</p>
<p>I haven’t used C, but I’ve used Basic, C++, Matlab, and Mathematica.</p>
<p>If you’re getting into computational stuff I imagine you’re more likely to see C pop up.</p>
<p>I guarantee someone who does materials engineering uses C for their coding but that isn’t all you could use. For simulations, you will generally see C or Fortran. C++ is becoming more and more prevalent for this too. </p>
<p>I would recommend get used to MATLAB first at least, though, because this is more typical for engineering applications that don’t require supercomputers and there are many efficient built in functions for MATLAB. It is also much quicker to code up things. </p>
<p>If you want to work on any other languages, I would say try learning C/C++.</p>
<p>Nope. C++ is more common than C, but I did Java. Although I’m sure it would be as useful as any programming, the first language is the real hurdle.</p>
<p>If you know Java, it is very, very similar to C++ (one might argue that Java is a bit more modern or natural as an object oriented language). C++ is a library extension of C to include object oriented structure. So if you know one of those languages, you can “learn” any of the others in a matter of days (hours?). It’s true.
One advantage of C is that it has really compact compilers and ran very fast, so it was traditionally used in embedded programming, for instance with computer controlled machines, etc. For those sorts of applications it replaced assembly language programming (making a couple of the computer languages I know essentially obsolete 
)
Also, a lot of high level (interpreted) languages such as R or MATLAB allow you to compile code that is a bottleneck, the usual languages for that purpose are C or Fortran (sometime C++). I use C a lot for code that has to be fast but is called by other languages.</p>