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Is teaching people data structures and programming techniques in C really useful today? Yes I know C is used in many things still and in Linux. But there is far
by coldcode 9y ago
Is teaching people data structures and programming techniques in C really useful today? Yes I know C is used in many things still and in Linux. But there is far more variety in what people are paying programmers to use these days, most of them OO or Functional in nature, neither of which C is. Maybe there is no other common denominator language one could use that is more generally applicable? If you ignore Objective-C I haven't used plain C for anything at all since 1999 even though I used it for more than a decade from the mid 80's on as my only language.
- falcolas 9y agoI recommend reading the section on why C: section 1.4.1 Seems reasonable to me. We learn math by doing by hand, so we can understand the whys and how’s. This doc (and course), correctly or not, draws the same parallel with C.
- megaman22 9y agoI don't know of a better way to teach people how pointers work, and all the other low-level details that higher-level languages gloss over. Day to day, I agree, you're probably not going to want to be fiddling raw pointers unless you have to, but for pedadogic purposes, it's worth knowing. Particularly with so many languages building on C and C-isms.
- saghm 9y ago> "I don't know of a better way to teach people how pointers work, and all the other low-level details that higher-level languages gloss over" I definitely agree, but I'm not sure that a data structures/algorithms course is the best place to be teaching that. I don't know anything about Yale's CS curriculum, but I'd hope there's at least one systems programming course in there.