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I still don't understand why you should learn C if you really want to know "how the computer works". The author says "By learning C, you can learn more about ho

I still don't understand why you should learn C if you really want to know "how the computer works". The author says "By learning C, you can learn more about how computers work", but why taking the long path if the short path exists? Just learn assembly language. It doesn't take that much time, a few weeks are enough to get a good insight into how simple CPU work (registers, memory, no difference between numbers and pointers, a stack that grows, etc.). Why spending time on learning C if you already know that this is not what you actually wanted? That's like wanting to learn German and then learning Dutch because you heard it's easier than German. To all the people who are going to reply "But machine language is not how the CPU works!!1!!111": Yes, I know that real modern CPUs translate the machine code to something else internally and that they do things like register renaming and microinstruction reordering and they have ports and TLBs and instruction caches and data caches etc. But CPUs still have registers and an instruction pointer and most of them have a stack pointer and interrupts and exceptions. C will definitely NOT help you to understand those things.

munificent 8y ago
> if you really want to know "how the computer works". This depends on what the person is really trying to learn. If they are just interested in learning how a simple CPU does what it does, then, yes, going straight to an assembly language for some old chip from the 80s is a good idea. Writing an emulator is a fun and instructive exercise. But my impression is that most programmers who want to learn how the computer works want to because they want to be able to write more efficient software. They want to understand how computer performance works. Learning a simple CPU is anti-helpful for that. It leads you to believe wrong things like "all memory access is equally fast". If you want to learn how to write faster code, C is pretty good because it strips away the constant factor overhead of higher level languages where things like GC, dynamic dispatch, and "everything is a reference" mask hardware-level performance effects. It lets you control layout in memory, so you can control data cache effects. Without a VM or interpreter overhead, most of the branches the CPU takes will be branches you explicitly write in your code, so you can control things like the branch predictor.

munificent 8y ago

> if you really want to know "how the computer works". This depends on what the person is really trying to learn. If they are just interested in learning how a simple CPU does what it does, then, yes, going straight to an assembly language for some old chip from the 80s is a good idea. Writing an emulator is a fun and instructive exercise. But my impression is that most programmers who want to learn how the computer works want to because they want to be able to write more efficient software. They want to understand how computer performance works. Learning a simple CPU is anti-helpful for that. It leads you to believe wrong things like "all memory access is equally fast". If you want to learn how to write faster code, C is pretty good because it strips away the constant factor overhead of higher level languages where things like GC, dynamic dispatch, and "everything is a reference" mask hardware-level performance effects. It lets you control layout in memory, so you can control data cache effects. Without a VM or interpreter overhead, most of the branches the CPU takes will be branches you explicitly write in your code, so you can control things like the branch predictor.