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0 pointsObieJazz17y ago0 comments

I don't understand the mystique surrounding C. If you forget about pointers and structs for a minute and keep everything to one .c file and one .h file, there's nothing that would keep a beginner from learning the rest. Even though you can do complicated things with it, it's not that complicated of a language. Once a beginner learns to deal with "array index out of bounds" etc. they'll have a much easier time writing well-formed code in the future. C's role as an ancestor of (almost) all modern languages means that once you're familiar with it, new languages will be easier to pick up. Plus, the language has a great book: I'd tell a beginner to pick up Kernighan and Ritchie and read that.

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jdminhbg17y ago

You can learn CS 101-type C pretty quickly by eliminating pointers/structs/etc., but you won't be able to read/alter any real-world open source C. If you learn Python or Ruby, for example, you can jump into github and see what people are doing right now.

If you're looking for an ancestor language, you'd be just as well off learning Smalltalk, which you can do real things with immediately (e.g. learn it in the browser with Seaside), and then apply those lessons to modern languages like Obj-C and Ruby.

guruz17y ago

Array index out of bounds? isn't it more like just getting weird data or a segfault or whatever else will make a newbie freak out? :)

C might not be mysterious for you (or me), but we possibly had a little more than 8 months.

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