C is a general-purpose programming language developed in the 1970s. It is commonly used to develop operating systems and embedded systems due to its high execution speed and ability to work with limited memory. C has its own character set including digits, alphabets, and special symbols. Keywords like if, else, while are reserved words that cannot be used as variable names. Statements in C are terminated with a semicolon and the main() function marks the starting point of a program. Programs are compiled and executed using a C compiler.