Standard HN comment, and also absolutely insane. Have you met people with limited computer experience just getting 'into' it? Computers and code are literal ma

Standard HN comment, and also absolutely insane. Have you met people with limited computer experience just getting 'into' it? Computers and code are literal magic to them. I mean people who's lives don't really entail a computer at all beyond social media. I taught at a local bootcamp. It had less to do with code and more to do with getting people to think in abstractions within a specific domain. If you can sit in a room for days on end juggling the uncertainty of learning something completely new, more power to you I guess. And that's like nobody. I consider myself decently intelligent and I almost went insane trying to teach myself something I had zero prior experience in. Literally wasted like 4 months due to uncertainty/following wrong info. Many moments of "oh, I didn't need to learn any of that actually". This is why bootcamps are amazing, you have experts roaming around that you can tap into at any second. Somewhat ironically paying that $15k for the bootcamp would have saved me a lot of money in opportunity cost and sanity. >C is a general-purpose programming language which features economy of expression, modern control flow and data structures, and a rich set of operators. C is not a "very high level" language, nor a "big" one, and is not specialized to any particular area of application. But its absence of restrictions and its generality make it more convenient and effective for many tasks than supposedly more powerful languages. Just reading the first paragraph already opens a world of questions, and this is way before you even get to any Hello World stuff. Just telling a beginner "Hey you should read this C book" would open up questions like "What is C? You're telling me I have to learn an entire new language just to make that tiny thing? Screw that!" Have fun untangling yourself out of that one. External motivators work, there's a reason we have entire academic institutions instead of a world of disconnected hermits.