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I agree with you 100%, if you're learning to program on your own. I disagree 100%, if you're talking about a college curriculum. The intro class at my univers

I agree with you 100%, if you're learning to program on your own. I disagree 100%, if you're talking about a college curriculum. The intro class at my university [1] used C, and I'm incredibly grateful. If I hadn't been forced to grok pointers and malloc, I'm not sure I ever would have (I haven't done any C programming since then). But even though I'm not writing C directly, knowing how things work at a lower level has helped me understand all sorts of concepts in higher-level languages. [1] http://cs50.tv http://cs50.tv

loup-vaillant 15y ago
Err, I agree with much of your "I disagree" paragraph. Maybe you should re-read my previous comments. I don't loathe C nearly as much as C++. I understand that learning about low level is useful. Pointers are indeed a very important concept (though not so difficult once you understand that variables themselves are already a form of indirection). So is Manual memory management. But if you are tempted to put C++ in the same basket, don't. C++ is a very very different language from C. Sure, it looks like it just has some additional features here and there, but those features make C++ practices very different from C ones.