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I like c++ but it feels maddening to learn. There was a time when I would tell people to learn C++ but now I tell them to start with C and work their way up bec

I like c++ but it feels maddening to learn. There was a time when I would tell people to learn C++ but now I tell them to start with C and work their way up because if the choice is between C and C++, C has become the more readable language somehow if you don't know what abstract classes, templates, and functional constructs are....even a bubble sort in C++ takes some explaining in terms of just the syntax sugar. GO and rust are great languages and I hope they go the distance and learn some of the lessons from C and especially C++

swatcoder 4y ago
Even as a polyglot that picks up new languages quickly and often, I think this is true of most actively maintained major languages now. We’re in an age where major languages are expected to cross-pollinate: if there’s a cool paradigm or technique in some other major language, how do we evolve our language to support it? That’s not a terrible thing in itself, but it means that most major languages are multi-paradigm now and become more so every release. As a consequence, learning becomes less straightforward. C may feel like a nice starter to you specifically because it’s been comparatively resistant to this trend. It’s got a ton of tricks to learn, but there are only a few paths through learning it.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Even with C it only looks like it, if one sticks mainly with a specific compiler and OS.
- gotaquestion 4y ago
  C takes on many dialects based on specialization. Compare code from the following, and you will see a range from trivial to understand to WTF. These are all real-world applications: - Linux kernel (events) - https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/kernel/events/core.c https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/kernel/events/... - Arm CMSIS - (16-bit math) - https://github.com/ARM-software/CMSIS_5/blob/develop/CMSIS/DSP/Source/StatisticsFunctions/arm_absmax_no_idx_f16.c https://github.com/ARM-software/CMSIS_5/blob/develop/CMSIS/D... - Numerical Methods in C - (Jacobian FP) - https://github.com/saulwiggin/Numerical-Recipies-in-C/blob/master/Chapter11.Eigensystems/jacobi.c https://github.com/saulwiggin/Numerical-Recipies-in-C/blob/m... - GNU 'ls' Command - https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/ls.c https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/ls.c - Gstreamer - (De-facto media streaming) - https://github.com/GStreamer/gstreamer/blob/master/gst/gstelement.c https://github.com/GStreamer/gstreamer/blob/master/gst/gstel... GStreamer is my favorite because it basically creates VTables like C++ but calls them Klasses (based on Gnome), and it is just a brilliant framework in general, but an utter perversion of C IMHO.
  - mrlonglong 4y ago
    The Linux kernel does the same thing as Gstreamer with file operations etc, I r thought it pretty neat, not really a perversion at all.
    - gotaquestion 4y ago
      I didn't know that. Cool. Also, I was being silly, because for some reason it took me a while to get my head around klass, and compared to my other listed samples, it is an oddball.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
tialaramex 4y ago
If what you need is C++ (which IMNSHO it is not) then starting with C is a bad idea. Here's Kate Gregory's talk, you should definitely listen to her even if you think I'm an idiot because she actually teaches people C++ and I (thankfully) do not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnWhqhNdYyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnWhqhNdYyk Now here's my rant, which is unrelated to Kate's very smart talk: C has an excuse, because it was written in the 1970s for the PDP-11. In the 1970s struct qualifies as a fancy new feature. In the 1970s a wide pointer is very expensive. In the 1970s a linked list is often a good choice of data structure. C++ comes along quite a lot later. These things are already untrue or fast becoming untrue, but rather than risk being unpopular Bjarne's language just cargo cults C. It is almost all of C, plus more... stuff. C++ does not fix any of the worst problems with C, because doing so would risk losing compatibility and hurt Bjarne's adoption story. As a result, with only a handful of exceptions all of that broken garbage is still there. C++ still has the almost useless built-in array type from C, it keeps weird syntax from C that was too hard to ban in the 1970s compiler but you should never use, its built-in types have the same stupid, confusing names like "long" and "double", it has this awful "macro pre-processor" which makes even trivial tooling problems very difficult and set back software quality by at least a decade. Kate's approach avoids teaching beginners about most of this. It's still there, which is bad, but at least you aren't making them learn about it, only to them immediately tell them it's forbidden knowledge and is prohibited in your nice modern C++ codebase. Instead of starting with raw pointers, and then trying to impress upon them later that these are a bad idea, Kate gets to begin with references and then a smart owning pointer.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Struct was already a feature in Jovial in 1958, but I digress. Plenty of very hard 1970's features at Bell Labs, weren't a problem at IBM, DEC, Xerox, Olivetti,.... As for the way C compatibility taints C++, I agree, however Bjarne made juice with the lemons he had, and if it is to do a Python 3 in the C++ world, then most would rather migrate to Rust than use such C incompatible C++.
  - annowiki 4y ago
    Why wouldn't they just use the older version of C++? If you don't want non-c compatible c++ you could just stick to C++20 instead of upgrading to "C++breaking_changes". I ask because its not like support will ever be phased out like Python 2.
inetknght 4y ago
> There was a time when I would tell people to learn C++ but now I tell them to start with C and work their way up I tell people to learn Python. When they get a hang of it then I introduce them to C and pointers. When they can demonstrate effective use of pointers without blowing up then advance to C++. If not then just keep using Python. I'd rather them learn computer science fundamentals on the easy language. Then they can learn the better language out of necessity ("i need more performance" or "i need more control over the data structure in memory" or similar) instead of shoehorning them into a language they're not ready for. I love C++. But it's not for everyone.
- patrick451 4y ago
  Genuine question: how do you teach beginners about python's value and reference semantics if they don't know what a pointer is? When I learned python, I knew a but of C, but was certainly no expert. I remember finding it incredibly confusing that I could pass a list or instance of a class to a function, mutate it, and the caller would see that mutation, but the same did not hold for say a float. The only way I could make sense of it was to mentally classify certain types of objects as "getting secretly passed by pointer", and others as getting evidently passed by value. Without at least a familiarity with C, I think that would have been much harder to understand.
  - inetknght 4y ago
    > how do you teach beginners about python's value and reference semantics The great thing about Python is that it's super easy to learn by example without having to troubleshoot cryptic compiler errors first. So show them a few objects. Modify those objects. Show them how to deep-copy objects and how to modify objects by reference without a deep-copy. Once the examples have been made then start asking about how they might write their own, in Python, types that could be deep-copied or reference-modified. Make sure to include your own questions about classes, class attributes, function parameters, initialization, and forced cleanup using either `del` or `with` -- it's handy to use a file object for examples of object destruction since that's buffered and so writes to it won't show up until it's flushed or closed (which occurs automatically when the file object is destroyed). Then you might expand to questions like: if you have a property somewhere that points to "some reference" but the reference could change to one of several different objects or maybe even to none of the objects, how would you do that? Is the property maybe pointing to one of the other objects? There are many ways to do this and most of them are "valid" for mentoring. What are some other ways to do it and what are some of pitfalls or benefits to the other ways? From there you can segue your way into describing what a pointer is "under the hood" if you think the student is ready for more info about pointers.
codr7 4y ago
These days it makes more sense to start from the other end if you ask me, and that has been true for quite a while. I find that my C++ style has drifted further and further into value land with time, which is a major difference to C where the same style is pretty much impossible to pull off. From one perspective, the language gets less and less complex; but the flip side is that all the old stuff is still in there and has the potential to cause a lot of trouble if you're not familiar with the details. Taken as a whole, it's pretty much an impossible language to master and has been for some time.
kllrnohj 4y ago
This is totally backwards advice. If you're going to teach C/C++, it makes far more sense to start with modern c++ which takes care of so much for you. std::string, std::vector, std::unique_ptr, and std::shared_ptr all alone make C++ far more approachable (and readable!) than C. And you can just entirely avoid pointers for a while, avoiding the need to cover things like avoiding returning pointers to stack values until much, much later. After that you can then peel back the layers and discuss things like manual memory allocations, how vectors work under the covers, etc... But C is an awful language to start with. It's incredibly complex to actually use and full of sharp edges. The grammar simplicity betrays the extreme mental complexity to actually use it without crashing or leaking memory everywhere. Not to mention the huge overhead in just doing simple things since nothing is included, and nothing is straightforward (like containers like hashmaps - hugely complex in C, trivial as heck in every other language) And that's before you get into the fact that you can't even just learn C. You have to also learn macros at the same time to actually do anything effectively, which is basically a second language full of its own quirks and problems. With C++ you can reasonably avoid learning macros for a long, long time.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  C is more useful to a broader range of programmers than C++. If your goal is to maintain million LOC C++ projects and make that your whole career, then spending the considerable time effort in C++ is worth it. But the whole world speaks C, it's so much simller. If your goal is to wrap existing libraries or speed up a hot spot in a language like python, plain C is a no brainer.
  - kllrnohj 4y ago
    C as an ABI is basically its own thing. And can be implementated in C++ anyway just with 'extern "C"' slapped onto the function. But it definitely doesn't make sense to start teaching anything at this level with "here's how you design a stable API/ABI". That's a skill set that relatively few need to know
    - LAC-Tech 4y ago

swatcoder 4y ago

Even as a polyglot that picks up new languages quickly and often, I think this is true of most actively maintained major languages now. We’re in an age where major languages are expected to cross-pollinate: if there’s a cool paradigm or technique in some other major language, how do we evolve our language to support it? That’s not a terrible thing in itself, but it means that most major languages are multi-paradigm now and become more so every release. As a consequence, learning becomes less straightforward. C may feel like a nice starter to you specifically because it’s been comparatively resistant to this trend. It’s got a ton of tricks to learn, but there are only a few paths through learning it.

pjmlp 4y ago
Even with C it only looks like it, if one sticks mainly with a specific compiler and OS.
gotaquestion 4y ago
C takes on many dialects based on specialization. Compare code from the following, and you will see a range from trivial to understand to WTF. These are all real-world applications: - Linux kernel (events) - https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/kernel/events/core.c https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/kernel/events/... - Arm CMSIS - (16-bit math) - https://github.com/ARM-software/CMSIS_5/blob/develop/CMSIS/DSP/Source/StatisticsFunctions/arm_absmax_no_idx_f16.c https://github.com/ARM-software/CMSIS_5/blob/develop/CMSIS/D... - Numerical Methods in C - (Jacobian FP) - https://github.com/saulwiggin/Numerical-Recipies-in-C/blob/master/Chapter11.Eigensystems/jacobi.c https://github.com/saulwiggin/Numerical-Recipies-in-C/blob/m... - GNU 'ls' Command - https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/ls.c https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/ls.c - Gstreamer - (De-facto media streaming) - https://github.com/GStreamer/gstreamer/blob/master/gst/gstelement.c https://github.com/GStreamer/gstreamer/blob/master/gst/gstel... GStreamer is my favorite because it basically creates VTables like C++ but calls them Klasses (based on Gnome), and it is just a brilliant framework in general, but an utter perversion of C IMHO.
- mrlonglong 4y ago
  The Linux kernel does the same thing as Gstreamer with file operations etc, I r thought it pretty neat, not really a perversion at all.
  - gotaquestion 4y ago
    I didn't know that. Cool. Also, I was being silly, because for some reason it took me a while to get my head around klass, and compared to my other listed samples, it is an oddball.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

tialaramex 4y ago

If what you need is C++ (which IMNSHO it is not) then starting with C is a bad idea. Here's Kate Gregory's talk, you should definitely listen to her even if you think I'm an idiot because she actually teaches people C++ and I (thankfully) do not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnWhqhNdYyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnWhqhNdYyk Now here's my rant, which is unrelated to Kate's very smart talk: C has an excuse, because it was written in the 1970s for the PDP-11. In the 1970s struct qualifies as a fancy new feature. In the 1970s a wide pointer is very expensive. In the 1970s a linked list is often a good choice of data structure. C++ comes along quite a lot later. These things are already untrue or fast becoming untrue, but rather than risk being unpopular Bjarne's language just cargo cults C. It is almost all of C, plus more... stuff. C++ does not fix any of the worst problems with C, because doing so would risk losing compatibility and hurt Bjarne's adoption story. As a result, with only a handful of exceptions all of that broken garbage is still there. C++ still has the almost useless built-in array type from C, it keeps weird syntax from C that was too hard to ban in the 1970s compiler but you should never use, its built-in types have the same stupid, confusing names like "long" and "double", it has this awful "macro pre-processor" which makes even trivial tooling problems very difficult and set back software quality by at least a decade. Kate's approach avoids teaching beginners about most of this. It's still there, which is bad, but at least you aren't making them learn about it, only to them immediately tell them it's forbidden knowledge and is prohibited in your nice modern C++ codebase. Instead of starting with raw pointers, and then trying to impress upon them later that these are a bad idea, Kate gets to begin with references and then a smart owning pointer.

pjmlp 4y ago
Struct was already a feature in Jovial in 1958, but I digress. Plenty of very hard 1970's features at Bell Labs, weren't a problem at IBM, DEC, Xerox, Olivetti,.... As for the way C compatibility taints C++, I agree, however Bjarne made juice with the lemons he had, and if it is to do a Python 3 in the C++ world, then most would rather migrate to Rust than use such C incompatible C++.
- annowiki 4y ago
  Why wouldn't they just use the older version of C++? If you don't want non-c compatible c++ you could just stick to C++20 instead of upgrading to "C++breaking_changes". I ask because its not like support will ever be phased out like Python 2.

inetknght 4y ago

> There was a time when I would tell people to learn C++ but now I tell them to start with C and work their way up I tell people to learn Python. When they get a hang of it then I introduce them to C and pointers. When they can demonstrate effective use of pointers without blowing up then advance to C++. If not then just keep using Python. I'd rather them learn computer science fundamentals on the easy language. Then they can learn the better language out of necessity ("i need more performance" or "i need more control over the data structure in memory" or similar) instead of shoehorning them into a language they're not ready for. I love C++. But it's not for everyone.

patrick451 4y ago
Genuine question: how do you teach beginners about python's value and reference semantics if they don't know what a pointer is? When I learned python, I knew a but of C, but was certainly no expert. I remember finding it incredibly confusing that I could pass a list or instance of a class to a function, mutate it, and the caller would see that mutation, but the same did not hold for say a float. The only way I could make sense of it was to mentally classify certain types of objects as "getting secretly passed by pointer", and others as getting evidently passed by value. Without at least a familiarity with C, I think that would have been much harder to understand.
- inetknght 4y ago
  > how do you teach beginners about python's value and reference semantics The great thing about Python is that it's super easy to learn by example without having to troubleshoot cryptic compiler errors first. So show them a few objects. Modify those objects. Show them how to deep-copy objects and how to modify objects by reference without a deep-copy. Once the examples have been made then start asking about how they might write their own, in Python, types that could be deep-copied or reference-modified. Make sure to include your own questions about classes, class attributes, function parameters, initialization, and forced cleanup using either `del` or `with` -- it's handy to use a file object for examples of object destruction since that's buffered and so writes to it won't show up until it's flushed or closed (which occurs automatically when the file object is destroyed). Then you might expand to questions like: if you have a property somewhere that points to "some reference" but the reference could change to one of several different objects or maybe even to none of the objects, how would you do that? Is the property maybe pointing to one of the other objects? There are many ways to do this and most of them are "valid" for mentoring. What are some other ways to do it and what are some of pitfalls or benefits to the other ways? From there you can segue your way into describing what a pointer is "under the hood" if you think the student is ready for more info about pointers.

codr7 4y ago

These days it makes more sense to start from the other end if you ask me, and that has been true for quite a while. I find that my C++ style has drifted further and further into value land with time, which is a major difference to C where the same style is pretty much impossible to pull off. From one perspective, the language gets less and less complex; but the flip side is that all the old stuff is still in there and has the potential to cause a lot of trouble if you're not familiar with the details. Taken as a whole, it's pretty much an impossible language to master and has been for some time.

kllrnohj 4y ago

This is totally backwards advice. If you're going to teach C/C++, it makes far more sense to start with modern c++ which takes care of so much for you. std::string, std::vector, std::unique_ptr, and std::shared_ptr all alone make C++ far more approachable (and readable!) than C. And you can just entirely avoid pointers for a while, avoiding the need to cover things like avoiding returning pointers to stack values until much, much later. After that you can then peel back the layers and discuss things like manual memory allocations, how vectors work under the covers, etc... But C is an awful language to start with. It's incredibly complex to actually use and full of sharp edges. The grammar simplicity betrays the extreme mental complexity to actually use it without crashing or leaking memory everywhere. Not to mention the huge overhead in just doing simple things since nothing is included, and nothing is straightforward (like containers like hashmaps - hugely complex in C, trivial as heck in every other language) And that's before you get into the fact that you can't even just learn C. You have to also learn macros at the same time to actually do anything effectively, which is basically a second language full of its own quirks and problems. With C++ you can reasonably avoid learning macros for a long, long time.

LAC-Tech 4y ago
C is more useful to a broader range of programmers than C++. If your goal is to maintain million LOC C++ projects and make that your whole career, then spending the considerable time effort in C++ is worth it. But the whole world speaks C, it's so much simller. If your goal is to wrap existing libraries or speed up a hot spot in a language like python, plain C is a no brainer.
- kllrnohj 4y ago
  C as an ABI is basically its own thing. And can be implementated in C++ anyway just with 'extern "C"' slapped onto the function. But it definitely doesn't make sense to start teaching anything at this level with "here's how you design a stable API/ABI". That's a skill set that relatively few need to know
  - LAC-Tech 4y ago