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Why Learn to Program in C?

99 points by AlexeyBrin 11y ago

cballard 11y ago
I'm surprised that people have managed to get through a CS program without learning C (or, at least, C++)! It seems to me that programming should be taught simultaneously in Haskell (or Lisp?) and C. - C teaches you how computers work. - Haskell teaches you how programming logic works.
- luiz-pv9 11y ago
  C was the first official language I learned in school. It was very hard at first, mainly because I couldn't see how everything (memory management, pointers, references, data structures, etc.) would fit in a real world scenario. We didn't learn about Make and building automation until 3 months in the course. `gcc myfile.c -o myfile` was all we did, one concept at a time. Maybe programming 101 should start with a higher level language and dive slowly on "how does that work?".
- AlexeyBrin 11y ago
  Probably because some modern CS programs use Python for their intro courses and Java for the advanced ones.
  - khedoros 11y ago
    That's about right, I think. Mine started with Java (because the school was heavily supported by Sun). Some more advanced courses went into other styles of programming (Prolog for logic programming, Lisp for functional, ARM+MIPS assembly for low-level understanding). The C++ courses were purely electives and were taught in a "C with classes" style when I took them around 2005. Of course the compilers, networking, and robotics classes all assumed fluency in C, and of those, the series on compilers was required, so it was impossible to escape learning at least some enough C to pass those classes.
- Tomte 11y ago
  C doesn't really tell you how computers work, a healthy dose of Hennessy's book and an accompanying lecture works much better than learning C. But C has immense cultural value. Lots and lots of extant source code, important source code: Linux. The BSDs. PostgreSQL, SQLite, whatever. C is the lingua franca. "Everybody" speaks at least a little C, so it can be used as pseudocode notation (without learning some specific, maybe even ad-hoc, pseudo language).
  - mbrubeck 11y ago
    > C has immense cultural value. Lots and lots of extant source code, important source code Yes, exactly! In my opinion, C for a programmer or computer scientist is like Latin for a medieval scholar. You don’t need to speak it fluently, but it’s good to know enough to read other people’s works and understand how concepts are expressed. In practical terms, I think that almost any programmer can benefit from reading K&R and doing the exercises in it, even if they never go on to write “real” programs in C. The book is very short and readable, and finishing it is a much tinier task than learning the standard libraries and toolchain options and best practices and all the other stuff you need to be productive writing production-quality code.
  - allbody 11y ago
    > a healthy dose of Hennessy's book Most any CS book seems to have been written in C, Java, C++ and lately, Python. Are there books on computer architecture, algorithms, compilers, whatever written in Scheme?
    - Tomte 11y ago
      I have no idea what you're talking about. Are you interested in finding such a book? Do you try to refute any of my points? If so, which one?
      - allbody 11y ago
        I am not refuting. I was actually asking if there are CS books written in Lisp. Almost any CS book I've seen relies on C, C++ or something along those lines. > Are you interested in finding such a book? Yes.
- agentultra 11y ago
  I'm of the mind we should be teaching predicate and temporal logic, formal methods, and critical thinking before teaching languages. Though if you were to start with a language C might be a good one just to show you how sloppy thinking leads to incorrect behavior and poor performing programs.
  - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    I think you are absolutely right. This will (apparently) never happen. I actually had a conversation with the mathematics department chairman about this after I took the formal logic course as a junior in college. "Why wasn't this the first course I took?" I made A's on all subsequent math courses; I'd been a lot B's and C's up to then. He didn't say he knew why we don't. Now, this is a smallish college that started as a normal school - a teacher's college - and still is a teacher's college. The only graduate courses there were in education. I think we all actually know why. We cargo cult these things to a deep level. I don't think it's intentional; I think that very few people know what rigor and formalism are. It's painful to learn.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > - C teaches you how computers work. Except it doesn't. If any language "teaches you how computers work", its assembly. While a lot of the quirks of C's design compared to more "pure" structured programming languages (e.g., Pascal) reflect a desire to provide more direct access to common low-level features of systems of the time when C was introduced, it doesn't really teach you how computers work except insofar as trying to understand its quirks might motivate some inquiry into how computers work.
  - notacoward 11y ago
    Agreed. I would say that C teaches you how the OS API works. That doesn't map well to how even a simple computer works, let alone one with multiple processors, complex memory hierarchies, north and south bridges, various I/O adapters, etc. Don't even get me started on anything virtual or distributed. Knowing C might help, to the extent that code which might be useful to gain such understanding tends to be written in C, but the language itself isn't going to impart those lessons.
kozukumi 11y ago
I am a strong believer in learning C as your first language. Why? Well a number of reasons but the two main ones are 1) it teaches you about what is happening at a lower level so you have some idea about what is happening behind the scenes of that Java code you wrote or whatever and 2) it makes you appreciate just how lucky you have it in higher level languages. However I don't think you should start writing all your programs in C! Use the right tool for the job. If that job is something C makes sense for then go for it but if you are writing a webapp I wouldn't recommend you use C (although I would if you needed a fast, native library to call from your webapp).
- wtetzner 11y ago
  > although I would if you needed a fast, native library to call from your webapp Honestly, at this point you're probably better of using Rust for that.
ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
Until not too long ago, De Anza College still taught C as an introductory programming language (I think because some recently retired instructors wrote a textbook on it). Even now, from what I've seen of the syllabi online, their C++ course that replaced it is still mostly C with some sprinkling of classes added on. I thought it was a horrible idea, and I had a pretty miserable experience at De Anza. If you're just starting out programming, you should simply get used to writing code, and not fighting low level details of the language. C is the kind of thing that is useful, perhaps only as an advanced undergraduate course. Most beginning programmers need to start writing code, not get bogged down in pointer hell. And obviously most beginning programmers aren't going to be hacking away at *nix kernels or anything advanced like that.
- ldjb 11y ago
  I agree. When starting out with programming, the most important aspect to learn about is the program logic. Syntax and implementation details that are not strictly necessary just get in the way and are likely to confuse students. Once you're comfortable writing algorithms, then you can move onto languages with more complex syntax and features. That said, you could do a lot worse than C for an introductory programming language.
  - distances 11y ago
    My university used Scheme (a Lisp derivative) as the first programming course language, and these were some of the reasons why I found that an excellent choice. Some other points being that most people start on the same level, and functional languages allowing the construction of many concepts that are not part of the language itself.
- gjulianm 11y ago
  My experience is the reverse. I think that beginning with C gives you the necessary knowledge of the inner workings of programs and systems that is required if you want to end up with a degree in CS/CE/similar. I've seen too many programmers that started with Java or Python and then didn't know what exactly is memory, what is "allocation" or similar concepts that are required if you want to understand what's going on with your programs.
qwertyuiop924 11y ago
The whole handmade thing seems kind of silly. Yes, understanding what's beneath abstractions is important, but if you want to build software well, you should use your abstractions well, because not every piece of software needs lightning speed.
- adrusi 11y ago
  I don't think the author is arguing everyone should use c for everything. He is arguing that everyone should write something in c so that they understand the abstractions they use better. Abstraction is great because it let's you build your conceptual structure atop a virtual foundation, but your structure will be more grounded and therefore more sound if you learn to connect your understanding of the virtual foundation to its physical origins.
  - philipbuuck 11y ago
    Yep, exactly. Abstractions help make us more productive, but if we don't understand what it is they're actually abstracting, I believe they're limiting us, not enabling us.
    - qwertyuiop924 11y ago
      I'll toast to that. No, I was talking about the "Handmade Manifesto" that you linked to, which seemed to say that high-level abstractions are EVIL.
scottLobster 11y ago
While I agree with this in theory, I can't help but imagine that 20-30 years ago you could take this post, replace every instance of "C" with "assembly" and it would relate to a lot of developers at the time. The march of technology (and knowledge in general) is one of constant abstraction. We figure out ways to do more with less so we have more capacity left over for further advancement. You don't know 10x10=100 because your brain derives it every single time, you just memorize the fact, hopefully with understanding. In software terms that means higher level languages with sophisticated libraries, and languages like C are relegated to more of an infrastructure role. This isn't necessarily bad. If the technology is more capable then everybody wins at the end of the day. As the author points out there will always be a niche of enthusiasts/zealots who will lead the charge and further the field. The remaining 99% will learn what those people come up with and apply it. To the best of my knowledge that's how it's always been, and it's worked pretty well so far. So I'd say let people start off with high level languages if they want, but expose them to lower level languages and let them choose which demographic they end up joining.
goodcanadian 11y ago
I find it odd that anyone would question the value of learning C. I find the negative attitudes toward C to be very odd in general. Now, it is clear to me that I am in the minority, but I can't understand why people would be doing serious work in an interpreted language. I detest garbage collection as I have no control over it. I am sure I could write statements like this all day. Don't get me wrong: I use perl when it makes sense; I use Java when it makes sense. I quite like playing with new languages and seeing what I can do with them. There are many languages that are safer than C or easier to do particular tasks than with C, but I am very rarely happy with the trade offs. When I am trying to do serious work that is meant to stand the test of time, I'll use C.
- munificent 11y ago
  > I can't understand why people would be doing serious work in an interpreted language. I detest garbage collection as I have no control over it. You have no control over C's register allocator. (Well, very little, `register` doesn't mean much.) Assuming you use it, you have no control over how the standard library's malloc() and free() work. malloc() could be best-fit, first-fit, something else entirely, who knows. No control over fragmentation. You have no control over the CPU's branch predictor or cache eviction policy. You don't control the OS's thread scheduler, virtual memory implementation, etc. Everyone picks a spot where things below that level are details they don't want to care about. You may have picked a slightly lower level, but there's nothing fundamentally different between you liking C and someone else liking Java (which is GC but not interpreted), Forth (interpreted but not GC), or Ruby (GC and interpreted). People do serious work in Ruby for the same exact same reason you do serious work in C, it lets them control the things they need to control and ignore the things they don't.
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    Exactly. If I don't need to care about X, picking a language where I don't have to care about X is a win (for any value of X). That is, it's a win right up until the scope or scale grows to the point that I now have to care about X. Then the language where I "don't have to" usually turns into a language where I can't, and I'm trapped.
drelihan 11y ago
Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, Java are all (mostly) built in C ( not to mention most databases ). Why not learn to program in C?
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  The same reason I didn't learn woodworking, even though my house is mostly made of wood. I mean, look, I'm a professional C/C++ developer, and have been for 30 years. But the fact that your tools are written in it doesn't mean that you need to know it. (I need to know it because I work in embedded systems; C/C++ is the language of choice there, even now.)
- bachmeier 11y ago
  You realize that computers don't literally run C code, don't you? By that argument you should go further and build your own hardware, then write your own OS...you get the point.
  - philipbuuck 11y ago
    I think C is a good choice to stop. I know it's an abstraction itself, but beyond that you get into hardware specifics and often-closed OS code.
    - cyphar 11y ago
      > often-closed OS code. If you use GNU/Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, SmartOS, OpenIndiana, OpenSolaris, etc this isn't a problem.
bluedino 11y ago
C is great. I wouldn't recommend starting programming in C, though. At least not with the standard exercises you see. Get user input, read a file, do this do that with it. Why? the C standard library is full of gotchas and tricks and goofy shit that makes it unsuitable for new programmers. The comp.lang.c FAQ should be standard reading material for anyone taking a C class. Look at all the posts on StackOverflow about the stdio functions 'not working right' and asking how to do menial things like collect keypresses. C works well as a first language if you teach it like assembly (use of which as a teaching language is another debate): flip some bits and do some loops. But not for collecting user input/output. Half of your students are going to get stuck trying to collect a list of names from the user, before they even get a chance to get stuck trying to sort the list.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  Overcoming goofy shit and gotchas is part of any programming system.
  - mrestko 11y ago
    Yeah, but why start with an exceedingly painful one except to needlessly inflict pain and suffering on students. Better to lay the groundwork with a friendlier language, learn the basics, and then move on to the more complicated gottchas (at least in my amateur opinion).
    - bxh 11y ago
      What language would you suggest is friendlier, and less rife with gotchas? I find the rules of C fairly reasonable, at least on the surface.
      - pklausler 11y ago
        #include <stdio.h> int main(void) { (printf)("C is awesome\n"); return 0; }
      - pklausler 11y ago
eswat 11y ago
I enrolled in my university the same year they switched from teaching C to teaching Java in the CS curriculum. As someone that learned C++ in high school I was less than enthusiastic about this change. But what surprised me more was that the courses became more institutionalized. Professors were bettering you for a cushy career as an employee at a bank or large corporation instead of showing you how to use the computer to solve a dizzying amount of technical, social and and financial problems. I could understand a technical college emphasizing a safe, risk-free entry into a nice career but I expected better from a university.
rikkus 11y ago
Whenever I don't quite understand how something works in a programming language, I try to imagine how I might implement it in C. Or I look up the implementation, or write it myself. This helps me understand from 'first principles' or near enough.
yodsanklai 11y ago
I think it doesn't really matter what people learn as a first programming language. Eventually, any serious programmer will become familiar with the most common languages and paradigms, C being one of them. It may not be the best choice for beginners, but it's valid nonetheless. People can have fun learning algorithms without worrying too much about pointers and complicated type declarations. It's not like it's going to mess up their brain and prevent them from learning higher-level languages later on.
autoreleasepool 11y ago
If anyone is interested in learning C as a first language, the lectures from Harvad's CS50 course make it more than feasible[0]. IMO the practical advantage of learning C first is that all other curly-brace languages become very easy to pick up. [0] https://cs50.harvard.edu/lectures https://cs50.harvard.edu/lectures
pklausler 11y ago
Learning C is to computer programming what the study of human anatomy is to medicine. You may not enjoy it, but you will be dangerously uninformed if you don't do the work.
StillBored 11y ago
Ugh, while I 100% agree that learning C (or similar lower level language) should be a prereq for any programming job, the use of the K&R C book is idiomatic of what is wrong with C. To many people pick up that book and try to emulate what they read. I firmly believe that book will teach you every bad habit you should never use in actual practice. 30 years ago, many of those "tricks" made sense given the compilers and computers of the time, but today your much better just writing straight clean C (for example using array indexes instead of pointers). Not only because its more maintainable, but because it often generates more efficient code due to hardware support for base+displacement addressing and compilers abilities to understand the intent and optimize the resulting code. Furthermore, code like what you find in that book is what has given C a bad name due to buffer overflows and the dozens of other things people think are the fault of "C" rather than the programming environment around it. Not the least of which is a formatting scheme that hides bugs. So, PLEASE, if you are learning C, stay as far away from the K&R book as you can until you have gained enough proficiency to understand the pitfalls of may of the techniques taught in that book.
- LurkingPresence 11y ago
  What book (or other method) would recommend instead of K&R? (I agree with your point, I'm just curious)
- vram22 11y ago
  > hardware support for base+displacement addressing Not sure exactly what you mean by the "hardware support" part, unless it is machine instruction support of some kind for C syntax. (But I thought that a basic level of support for that was present in most processors - things like base + offset addressing mode, indirect addressing via the value in a register, etc.) But: a[i] is equivalent to star(a + i) in C. (The K&R book says so somewhere, in either the original or the ANSI C edition.) And star(a + i) is equivalent to star(i + a), by commutativity (a mathematical property) which is equivalent to i[a]. [1] So you can write any of the above 4 expressions equivalently. I verified it by writing and compiling such code after reading this in the K&R book years ago; still remember being surprised until I saw the logic made sense. [1] Or at least, it was so, some years ago, not sure about in C99 and such. I used "star" instead of the asterisk symbol in code above because the actual asterisk turned following text to italics - HN markup.
gavman 11y ago
While I agree with the premise that it is important to know C, I also agree with many of the comments here suggesting that there are other better first languages out there. As a recent college grad ('15), my intro course was in Python and then the next course was in C. Python was easy to jump into--it usually just made sense and worked. While learning about loops, lists, strings, etc, that was useful. Equally useful was then moving to C and getting a better understanding of the "lower level" (especially in the sophomore computer systems course). But you don't have to understand caches, page tables, and threading to jump into a first programming class and master the principles.
xyzzy4 11y ago
C is a beautiful and pure language. It is like the Latin of programming languages. I recommend everyone to at least learn it.
- pklausler 11y ago
  A language can be beautiful, pure, or Latin, but not all three.
amorphid 11y ago
I liked having Ruby as a first. The REPL made it easy to see what was going on (even if I didn't understand it), the community's like for testing is fabulous, and I became comfortable doing things at the command line.
huangc10 11y ago
One of the best academic decisions I've made as a student was to take a course on Operation Systems in C. I did take a beginners course in C previously so it was an intermediate class. Nothing compares to spending hours and hours grinding through thousands of lines of C and building your own passable OS from a skeleton kernel. It was the hardest course I've ever taken in college and it was my favorite. I can honestly say I'm a better programmer and engineer after that experience and would recommend anyone to take a course in OS (hopefully in C), and you'll know what I mean.
- belltyler 11y ago
  I took a very similar sounding course at Purdue (CS 503) and would second all of these sentiments.
jdbernard 11y ago
Why do so many people seem to think the author is advocating that you learn C as a first language? Did you read the article? He explicitly says the opposite: Does someone brand new to programming, who’s excited about making changes in the HTML on a page or setting up a blog to later customize, or just wants a slow introduction to more complex topics, really need to worry about cache coherency? Or threading? Clearly that’s a problem for down the road. Maybe that’s a road that some developers will never need to walk down at all, depending on their focus. His position is that, while C may not be the best language for everyone coming into programming it is beneficial to learn it eventually because it allow you to peel back the layers of abstraction underneath all of the goodies in your high-level language. This allows you to better understand and reason about even your higher-level code and opens the door to fixing and understanding a lot of things that would have constrained you previously. I completely, whole-heartedly agree. We don't always need to be able to plumb the depths of our abstraction stack. I don't believe it is necessary for a beginner. But having the ability to go up or down in the stack is extremely valuable. C is worth learning.
- philipbuuck 11y ago
  It's funny how the comments went down that road. I don't think C is a good choice for a first language. I would argue that C++ is an even worse choice than C, but that's for another article...
peter303 11y ago
You can write very C-like code inside of Java or C++. Just write one class and stuff all the variables and subroutine methods inside it. Many years ago I had to fix some bugs in such "converted" code. The programmer just wrapped old C code into one humungous dummy class.
philipbuuck 11y ago
I'm the author of the article. I don't think C should be the first language for most new programmers. The article doesn't recommend that. Rather, my argument is that C provides the lowest level abstraction that (most) modern programmers could ever need. By understanding C, you give yourself the ability to break into the black box of any higher-level language or framework. You're not at their mercy if they provide odd abstraction layers or bugs in their code. It seems to me, at least anecdotally, that beginner programmers using C feel like they can't do as much as other beginners using languages like Python or Java. Often this is because graphics are so much faster to get to when working with the libraries that those other languages offer. Without a standard graphics library, C feels like the weaker choice. How wrong that is, but I've heard this sentiment from several different beginners. I think part of what draws me to the Handmade Dev community is that we are finding so many people who know how to code, but want to feel more in control of their programs. Many people following my Handmade Quake project have told me that they're considering learning C for the first time ever. Maybe that's a good position for C to take in 2016 - a language to learn once you've learned your first language and some simple logic but want to understand the hardware better, or figure out exactly what code is running when you turn on your Python interpreter. I hope the community is able to plant that seed in the minds of as many programmers as possible.
craked5 11y ago
In my college here in Lisbon, almost all the courses that you did were in C, Programming 1 and 2, Operating Systems, Distributed Systems, etc etc, except for OO classes. They changed it to Python after i left but i am glad that i had the opportunity to learn C, although i don't use it very often in the "working world". I reckon that Python is a nicer language to a freshman that has never seen code before, but they should of kept stuff like OS and Distributed Systems in C.
stared 11y ago
C is an abstraction. Assembly is an abstraction. Even physical transistors are abstractions. You can go down the ladder as deep as you wish, there is no bottom. (Sure, you can delude yourself you that X is the fundamental level of Y... as long as you define Y properly.) In this grand scheme of things, C is not better than Python. I don't mean the we should avoid going deeper. I mean that each level of abstraction has its own benefits. BTW: How many of you started learning natural numbers not from counting fruits/blocks/candies, but from the ZF set theory axioms and the von Neumann construction?
- vram22 11y ago
  >How many of you started learning natural numbers not from counting fruits/blocks/candies, but from the ZF set theory axioms Ha ha, good one. I don't even know what the ZF set theory is. Not putting down theory either in general or in this case, of course.
  - amagumori 11y ago
    Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, an axiomatic set theory that basically forms a logical "foundation" for math. I think this comparison of counting blocks to zf set theory is super hyperbolic and not accurate though.
    - vram22 11y ago
      Thanks. Will look it up.
    - stared 11y ago
      It is a hyperbolic, but not far from "Python is magic, C is real programming". (It would be more like "Python is magic, Turing machine is real programming".)
Apocryphon 11y ago
Classic Joel Spolsky essay: "Back to Basics" - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html
xufi 11y ago
Interesting. I havent' delved quite much in to C but no doubt I will try to get more in to it during my spare time. IT's a good basis that some other high entity languages drew their cues from
gozur88 11y ago
The problem with learning C is it's easy to code things that work most of the time, but not always. A great many C coders don't really understand the architecture, and they don't get the immediate feedback that learning requires. In my last big C project it wasn't uncommon at all to find memory leaks and out of scope references to stack variables. You'd add a line of code and the whole thing would blow up because it changed the state of the stack and unmasked a problem in another module. I would find the culprit and figure out if they were being sloppy or they just didn't understand, and it was usually the latter. This from people who had been programming professionally for a year or two.

99 points by AlexeyBrin 11y ago

I'm surprised that people have managed to get through a CS program without learning C (or, at least, C++)! It seems to me that programming should be taught simultaneously in Haskell (or Lisp?) and C. - C teaches you how computers work. - Haskell teaches you how programming logic works.

luiz-pv9 11y ago
C was the first official language I learned in school. It was very hard at first, mainly because I couldn't see how everything (memory management, pointers, references, data structures, etc.) would fit in a real world scenario. We didn't learn about Make and building automation until 3 months in the course. `gcc myfile.c -o myfile` was all we did, one concept at a time. Maybe programming 101 should start with a higher level language and dive slowly on "how does that work?".
AlexeyBrin 11y ago
Probably because some modern CS programs use Python for their intro courses and Java for the advanced ones.
- khedoros 11y ago
  That's about right, I think. Mine started with Java (because the school was heavily supported by Sun). Some more advanced courses went into other styles of programming (Prolog for logic programming, Lisp for functional, ARM+MIPS assembly for low-level understanding). The C++ courses were purely electives and were taught in a "C with classes" style when I took them around 2005. Of course the compilers, networking, and robotics classes all assumed fluency in C, and of those, the series on compilers was required, so it was impossible to escape learning at least some enough C to pass those classes.
Tomte 11y ago
C doesn't really tell you how computers work, a healthy dose of Hennessy's book and an accompanying lecture works much better than learning C. But C has immense cultural value. Lots and lots of extant source code, important source code: Linux. The BSDs. PostgreSQL, SQLite, whatever. C is the lingua franca. "Everybody" speaks at least a little C, so it can be used as pseudocode notation (without learning some specific, maybe even ad-hoc, pseudo language).
- mbrubeck 11y ago
  > C has immense cultural value. Lots and lots of extant source code, important source code Yes, exactly! In my opinion, C for a programmer or computer scientist is like Latin for a medieval scholar. You don’t need to speak it fluently, but it’s good to know enough to read other people’s works and understand how concepts are expressed. In practical terms, I think that almost any programmer can benefit from reading K&R and doing the exercises in it, even if they never go on to write “real” programs in C. The book is very short and readable, and finishing it is a much tinier task than learning the standard libraries and toolchain options and best practices and all the other stuff you need to be productive writing production-quality code.
- allbody 11y ago
  > a healthy dose of Hennessy's book Most any CS book seems to have been written in C, Java, C++ and lately, Python. Are there books on computer architecture, algorithms, compilers, whatever written in Scheme?
  - Tomte 11y ago
    I have no idea what you're talking about. Are you interested in finding such a book? Do you try to refute any of my points? If so, which one?
    - allbody 11y ago
      I am not refuting. I was actually asking if there are CS books written in Lisp. Almost any CS book I've seen relies on C, C++ or something along those lines. > Are you interested in finding such a book? Yes.
agentultra 11y ago
I'm of the mind we should be teaching predicate and temporal logic, formal methods, and critical thinking before teaching languages. Though if you were to start with a language C might be a good one just to show you how sloppy thinking leads to incorrect behavior and poor performing programs.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  I think you are absolutely right. This will (apparently) never happen. I actually had a conversation with the mathematics department chairman about this after I took the formal logic course as a junior in college. "Why wasn't this the first course I took?" I made A's on all subsequent math courses; I'd been a lot B's and C's up to then. He didn't say he knew why we don't. Now, this is a smallish college that started as a normal school - a teacher's college - and still is a teacher's college. The only graduate courses there were in education. I think we all actually know why. We cargo cult these things to a deep level. I don't think it's intentional; I think that very few people know what rigor and formalism are. It's painful to learn.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> - C teaches you how computers work. Except it doesn't. If any language "teaches you how computers work", its assembly. While a lot of the quirks of C's design compared to more "pure" structured programming languages (e.g., Pascal) reflect a desire to provide more direct access to common low-level features of systems of the time when C was introduced, it doesn't really teach you how computers work except insofar as trying to understand its quirks might motivate some inquiry into how computers work.
- notacoward 11y ago
  Agreed. I would say that C teaches you how the OS API works. That doesn't map well to how even a simple computer works, let alone one with multiple processors, complex memory hierarchies, north and south bridges, various I/O adapters, etc. Don't even get me started on anything virtual or distributed. Knowing C might help, to the extent that code which might be useful to gain such understanding tends to be written in C, but the language itself isn't going to impart those lessons.

kozukumi 11y ago

I am a strong believer in learning C as your first language. Why? Well a number of reasons but the two main ones are 1) it teaches you about what is happening at a lower level so you have some idea about what is happening behind the scenes of that Java code you wrote or whatever and 2) it makes you appreciate just how lucky you have it in higher level languages. However I don't think you should start writing all your programs in C! Use the right tool for the job. If that job is something C makes sense for then go for it but if you are writing a webapp I wouldn't recommend you use C (although I would if you needed a fast, native library to call from your webapp).

wtetzner 11y ago
> although I would if you needed a fast, native library to call from your webapp Honestly, at this point you're probably better of using Rust for that.

ZanyProgrammer 11y ago

Until not too long ago, De Anza College still taught C as an introductory programming language (I think because some recently retired instructors wrote a textbook on it). Even now, from what I've seen of the syllabi online, their C++ course that replaced it is still mostly C with some sprinkling of classes added on. I thought it was a horrible idea, and I had a pretty miserable experience at De Anza. If you're just starting out programming, you should simply get used to writing code, and not fighting low level details of the language. C is the kind of thing that is useful, perhaps only as an advanced undergraduate course. Most beginning programmers need to start writing code, not get bogged down in pointer hell. And obviously most beginning programmers aren't going to be hacking away at *nix kernels or anything advanced like that.

ldjb 11y ago
I agree. When starting out with programming, the most important aspect to learn about is the program logic. Syntax and implementation details that are not strictly necessary just get in the way and are likely to confuse students. Once you're comfortable writing algorithms, then you can move onto languages with more complex syntax and features. That said, you could do a lot worse than C for an introductory programming language.
- distances 11y ago
  My university used Scheme (a Lisp derivative) as the first programming course language, and these were some of the reasons why I found that an excellent choice. Some other points being that most people start on the same level, and functional languages allowing the construction of many concepts that are not part of the language itself.
gjulianm 11y ago
My experience is the reverse. I think that beginning with C gives you the necessary knowledge of the inner workings of programs and systems that is required if you want to end up with a degree in CS/CE/similar. I've seen too many programmers that started with Java or Python and then didn't know what exactly is memory, what is "allocation" or similar concepts that are required if you want to understand what's going on with your programs.

qwertyuiop924 11y ago

The whole handmade thing seems kind of silly. Yes, understanding what's beneath abstractions is important, but if you want to build software well, you should use your abstractions well, because not every piece of software needs lightning speed.

adrusi 11y ago
I don't think the author is arguing everyone should use c for everything. He is arguing that everyone should write something in c so that they understand the abstractions they use better. Abstraction is great because it let's you build your conceptual structure atop a virtual foundation, but your structure will be more grounded and therefore more sound if you learn to connect your understanding of the virtual foundation to its physical origins.
- philipbuuck 11y ago
  Yep, exactly. Abstractions help make us more productive, but if we don't understand what it is they're actually abstracting, I believe they're limiting us, not enabling us.
  - qwertyuiop924 11y ago
    I'll toast to that. No, I was talking about the "Handmade Manifesto" that you linked to, which seemed to say that high-level abstractions are EVIL.

scottLobster 11y ago

While I agree with this in theory, I can't help but imagine that 20-30 years ago you could take this post, replace every instance of "C" with "assembly" and it would relate to a lot of developers at the time. The march of technology (and knowledge in general) is one of constant abstraction. We figure out ways to do more with less so we have more capacity left over for further advancement. You don't know 10x10=100 because your brain derives it every single time, you just memorize the fact, hopefully with understanding. In software terms that means higher level languages with sophisticated libraries, and languages like C are relegated to more of an infrastructure role. This isn't necessarily bad. If the technology is more capable then everybody wins at the end of the day. As the author points out there will always be a niche of enthusiasts/zealots who will lead the charge and further the field. The remaining 99% will learn what those people come up with and apply it. To the best of my knowledge that's how it's always been, and it's worked pretty well so far. So I'd say let people start off with high level languages if they want, but expose them to lower level languages and let them choose which demographic they end up joining.

goodcanadian 11y ago

I find it odd that anyone would question the value of learning C. I find the negative attitudes toward C to be very odd in general. Now, it is clear to me that I am in the minority, but I can't understand why people would be doing serious work in an interpreted language. I detest garbage collection as I have no control over it. I am sure I could write statements like this all day. Don't get me wrong: I use perl when it makes sense; I use Java when it makes sense. I quite like playing with new languages and seeing what I can do with them. There are many languages that are safer than C or easier to do particular tasks than with C, but I am very rarely happy with the trade offs. When I am trying to do serious work that is meant to stand the test of time, I'll use C.

munificent 11y ago
> I can't understand why people would be doing serious work in an interpreted language. I detest garbage collection as I have no control over it. You have no control over C's register allocator. (Well, very little, `register` doesn't mean much.) Assuming you use it, you have no control over how the standard library's malloc() and free() work. malloc() could be best-fit, first-fit, something else entirely, who knows. No control over fragmentation. You have no control over the CPU's branch predictor or cache eviction policy. You don't control the OS's thread scheduler, virtual memory implementation, etc. Everyone picks a spot where things below that level are details they don't want to care about. You may have picked a slightly lower level, but there's nothing fundamentally different between you liking C and someone else liking Java (which is GC but not interpreted), Forth (interpreted but not GC), or Ruby (GC and interpreted). People do serious work in Ruby for the same exact same reason you do serious work in C, it lets them control the things they need to control and ignore the things they don't.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  Exactly. If I don't need to care about X, picking a language where I don't have to care about X is a win (for any value of X). That is, it's a win right up until the scope or scale grows to the point that I now have to care about X. Then the language where I "don't have to" usually turns into a language where I can't, and I'm trapped.

drelihan 11y ago

Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, Java are all (mostly) built in C ( not to mention most databases ). Why not learn to program in C?

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
The same reason I didn't learn woodworking, even though my house is mostly made of wood. I mean, look, I'm a professional C/C++ developer, and have been for 30 years. But the fact that your tools are written in it doesn't mean that you need to know it. (I need to know it because I work in embedded systems; C/C++ is the language of choice there, even now.)
bachmeier 11y ago
You realize that computers don't literally run C code, don't you? By that argument you should go further and build your own hardware, then write your own OS...you get the point.
- philipbuuck 11y ago
  I think C is a good choice to stop. I know it's an abstraction itself, but beyond that you get into hardware specifics and often-closed OS code.
  - cyphar 11y ago
    > often-closed OS code. If you use GNU/Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, SmartOS, OpenIndiana, OpenSolaris, etc this isn't a problem.

bluedino 11y ago

C is great. I wouldn't recommend starting programming in C, though. At least not with the standard exercises you see. Get user input, read a file, do this do that with it. Why? the C standard library is full of gotchas and tricks and goofy shit that makes it unsuitable for new programmers. The comp.lang.c FAQ should be standard reading material for anyone taking a C class. Look at all the posts on StackOverflow about the stdio functions 'not working right' and asking how to do menial things like collect keypresses. C works well as a first language if you teach it like assembly (use of which as a teaching language is another debate): flip some bits and do some loops. But not for collecting user input/output. Half of your students are going to get stuck trying to collect a list of names from the user, before they even get a chance to get stuck trying to sort the list.

tosseraccount 11y ago
Overcoming goofy shit and gotchas is part of any programming system.
- mrestko 11y ago
  Yeah, but why start with an exceedingly painful one except to needlessly inflict pain and suffering on students. Better to lay the groundwork with a friendlier language, learn the basics, and then move on to the more complicated gottchas (at least in my amateur opinion).
  - bxh 11y ago
    What language would you suggest is friendlier, and less rife with gotchas? I find the rules of C fairly reasonable, at least on the surface.
    - pklausler 11y ago
      #include <stdio.h> int main(void) { (printf)("C is awesome\n"); return 0; }
    - pklausler 11y ago

eswat 11y ago

I enrolled in my university the same year they switched from teaching C to teaching Java in the CS curriculum. As someone that learned C++ in high school I was less than enthusiastic about this change. But what surprised me more was that the courses became more institutionalized. Professors were bettering you for a cushy career as an employee at a bank or large corporation instead of showing you how to use the computer to solve a dizzying amount of technical, social and and financial problems. I could understand a technical college emphasizing a safe, risk-free entry into a nice career but I expected better from a university.

rikkus 11y ago

Whenever I don't quite understand how something works in a programming language, I try to imagine how I might implement it in C. Or I look up the implementation, or write it myself. This helps me understand from 'first principles' or near enough.

yodsanklai 11y ago

I think it doesn't really matter what people learn as a first programming language. Eventually, any serious programmer will become familiar with the most common languages and paradigms, C being one of them. It may not be the best choice for beginners, but it's valid nonetheless. People can have fun learning algorithms without worrying too much about pointers and complicated type declarations. It's not like it's going to mess up their brain and prevent them from learning higher-level languages later on.

autoreleasepool 11y ago

If anyone is interested in learning C as a first language, the lectures from Harvad's CS50 course make it more than feasible[0]. IMO the practical advantage of learning C first is that all other curly-brace languages become very easy to pick up. [0] https://cs50.harvard.edu/lectures https://cs50.harvard.edu/lectures

pklausler 11y ago

Learning C is to computer programming what the study of human anatomy is to medicine. You may not enjoy it, but you will be dangerously uninformed if you don't do the work.

StillBored 11y ago

Ugh, while I 100% agree that learning C (or similar lower level language) should be a prereq for any programming job, the use of the K&R C book is idiomatic of what is wrong with C. To many people pick up that book and try to emulate what they read. I firmly believe that book will teach you every bad habit you should never use in actual practice. 30 years ago, many of those "tricks" made sense given the compilers and computers of the time, but today your much better just writing straight clean C (for example using array indexes instead of pointers). Not only because its more maintainable, but because it often generates more efficient code due to hardware support for base+displacement addressing and compilers abilities to understand the intent and optimize the resulting code. Furthermore, code like what you find in that book is what has given C a bad name due to buffer overflows and the dozens of other things people think are the fault of "C" rather than the programming environment around it. Not the least of which is a formatting scheme that hides bugs. So, PLEASE, if you are learning C, stay as far away from the K&R book as you can until you have gained enough proficiency to understand the pitfalls of may of the techniques taught in that book.

LurkingPresence 11y ago
What book (or other method) would recommend instead of K&R? (I agree with your point, I'm just curious)
vram22 11y ago
> hardware support for base+displacement addressing Not sure exactly what you mean by the "hardware support" part, unless it is machine instruction support of some kind for C syntax. (But I thought that a basic level of support for that was present in most processors - things like base + offset addressing mode, indirect addressing via the value in a register, etc.) But: a[i] is equivalent to star(a + i) in C. (The K&R book says so somewhere, in either the original or the ANSI C edition.) And star(a + i) is equivalent to star(i + a), by commutativity (a mathematical property) which is equivalent to i[a]. [1] So you can write any of the above 4 expressions equivalently. I verified it by writing and compiling such code after reading this in the K&R book years ago; still remember being surprised until I saw the logic made sense. [1] Or at least, it was so, some years ago, not sure about in C99 and such. I used "star" instead of the asterisk symbol in code above because the actual asterisk turned following text to italics - HN markup.

gavman 11y ago

While I agree with the premise that it is important to know C, I also agree with many of the comments here suggesting that there are other better first languages out there. As a recent college grad ('15), my intro course was in Python and then the next course was in C. Python was easy to jump into--it usually just made sense and worked. While learning about loops, lists, strings, etc, that was useful. Equally useful was then moving to C and getting a better understanding of the "lower level" (especially in the sophomore computer systems course). But you don't have to understand caches, page tables, and threading to jump into a first programming class and master the principles.

xyzzy4 11y ago

C is a beautiful and pure language. It is like the Latin of programming languages. I recommend everyone to at least learn it.

pklausler 11y ago
A language can be beautiful, pure, or Latin, but not all three.

amorphid 11y ago

I liked having Ruby as a first. The REPL made it easy to see what was going on (even if I didn't understand it), the community's like for testing is fabulous, and I became comfortable doing things at the command line.

huangc10 11y ago

One of the best academic decisions I've made as a student was to take a course on Operation Systems in C. I did take a beginners course in C previously so it was an intermediate class. Nothing compares to spending hours and hours grinding through thousands of lines of C and building your own passable OS from a skeleton kernel. It was the hardest course I've ever taken in college and it was my favorite. I can honestly say I'm a better programmer and engineer after that experience and would recommend anyone to take a course in OS (hopefully in C), and you'll know what I mean.

belltyler 11y ago
I took a very similar sounding course at Purdue (CS 503) and would second all of these sentiments.

jdbernard 11y ago

Why do so many people seem to think the author is advocating that you learn C as a first language? Did you read the article? He explicitly says the opposite: Does someone brand new to programming, who’s excited about making changes in the HTML on a page or setting up a blog to later customize, or just wants a slow introduction to more complex topics, really need to worry about cache coherency? Or threading? Clearly that’s a problem for down the road. Maybe that’s a road that some developers will never need to walk down at all, depending on their focus. His position is that, while C may not be the best language for everyone coming into programming it is beneficial to learn it eventually because it allow you to peel back the layers of abstraction underneath all of the goodies in your high-level language. This allows you to better understand and reason about even your higher-level code and opens the door to fixing and understanding a lot of things that would have constrained you previously. I completely, whole-heartedly agree. We don't always need to be able to plumb the depths of our abstraction stack. I don't believe it is necessary for a beginner. But having the ability to go up or down in the stack is extremely valuable. C is worth learning.

philipbuuck 11y ago
It's funny how the comments went down that road. I don't think C is a good choice for a first language. I would argue that C++ is an even worse choice than C, but that's for another article...

peter303 11y ago

You can write very C-like code inside of Java or C++. Just write one class and stuff all the variables and subroutine methods inside it. Many years ago I had to fix some bugs in such "converted" code. The programmer just wrapped old C code into one humungous dummy class.

philipbuuck 11y ago

I'm the author of the article. I don't think C should be the first language for most new programmers. The article doesn't recommend that. Rather, my argument is that C provides the lowest level abstraction that (most) modern programmers could ever need. By understanding C, you give yourself the ability to break into the black box of any higher-level language or framework. You're not at their mercy if they provide odd abstraction layers or bugs in their code. It seems to me, at least anecdotally, that beginner programmers using C feel like they can't do as much as other beginners using languages like Python or Java. Often this is because graphics are so much faster to get to when working with the libraries that those other languages offer. Without a standard graphics library, C feels like the weaker choice. How wrong that is, but I've heard this sentiment from several different beginners. I think part of what draws me to the Handmade Dev community is that we are finding so many people who know how to code, but want to feel more in control of their programs. Many people following my Handmade Quake project have told me that they're considering learning C for the first time ever. Maybe that's a good position for C to take in 2016 - a language to learn once you've learned your first language and some simple logic but want to understand the hardware better, or figure out exactly what code is running when you turn on your Python interpreter. I hope the community is able to plant that seed in the minds of as many programmers as possible.

craked5 11y ago

In my college here in Lisbon, almost all the courses that you did were in C, Programming 1 and 2, Operating Systems, Distributed Systems, etc etc, except for OO classes. They changed it to Python after i left but i am glad that i had the opportunity to learn C, although i don't use it very often in the "working world". I reckon that Python is a nicer language to a freshman that has never seen code before, but they should of kept stuff like OS and Distributed Systems in C.

stared 11y ago

C is an abstraction. Assembly is an abstraction. Even physical transistors are abstractions. You can go down the ladder as deep as you wish, there is no bottom. (Sure, you can delude yourself you that X is the fundamental level of Y... as long as you define Y properly.) In this grand scheme of things, C is not better than Python. I don't mean the we should avoid going deeper. I mean that each level of abstraction has its own benefits. BTW: How many of you started learning natural numbers not from counting fruits/blocks/candies, but from the ZF set theory axioms and the von Neumann construction?

vram22 11y ago
>How many of you started learning natural numbers not from counting fruits/blocks/candies, but from the ZF set theory axioms Ha ha, good one. I don't even know what the ZF set theory is. Not putting down theory either in general or in this case, of course.
- amagumori 11y ago
  Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, an axiomatic set theory that basically forms a logical "foundation" for math. I think this comparison of counting blocks to zf set theory is super hyperbolic and not accurate though.
  - vram22 11y ago
    Thanks. Will look it up.
  - stared 11y ago
    It is a hyperbolic, but not far from "Python is magic, C is real programming". (It would be more like "Python is magic, Turing machine is real programming".)

Apocryphon 11y ago

Classic Joel Spolsky essay: "Back to Basics" - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html

xufi 11y ago

Interesting. I havent' delved quite much in to C but no doubt I will try to get more in to it during my spare time. IT's a good basis that some other high entity languages drew their cues from

gozur88 11y ago

The problem with learning C is it's easy to code things that work most of the time, but not always. A great many C coders don't really understand the architecture, and they don't get the immediate feedback that learning requires. In my last big C project it wasn't uncommon at all to find memory leaks and out of scope references to stack variables. You'd add a line of code and the whole thing would blow up because it changed the state of the stack and unmasked a problem in another module. I would find the culprit and figure out if they were being sloppy or they just didn't understand, and it was usually the latter. This from people who had been programming professionally for a year or two.