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I think that C is a very good first language to learn, not because it hardens you against errors, but because it has a very simple mental model that you can use
by Retra 10y ago
I think that C is a very good first language to learn, not because it hardens you against errors, but because it has a very simple mental model that you can use to understand how other might languages work in terms of C semantics, which provides useful clues for what the costs are for features in those languages.
- Roboprog 10y agoI'm pretty sure that if C was the first language presented to me back in college, I would have found a new major. C was more convenient than doing assembler, but not much more, compared to say Pascal. (Having learned BASIC, FORTRAN 77, Pascal, PDP-11 ASM, Lisp at school, and some dBASE at work, before we switched over to C at school, which seemed like a big step backward) var s : string; multi : integer; ... s := 'Hello' + ' ' + 'world'; multi := 616; writeln( s, ' ', multi : 4); vs char s[ 256 ]; int multi; ... s = strcat( strcat( "Hello", " "), "world"); multi = 616; printf( "%s %d4\n" s, multi); It's a shame no work was put into good Modula 2 compilers (for various platforms) around 85-90, rather than running with C as the standard. Imagine all the security disasters that probably would have been avoided.
- Retra 10y agoC was my first language, and I did find a new major (Physics/Mathematics.) I only considered going back for a CS degree after learning Haskell.