Some Makefile knowledge does not hurt much, but other than that it starts to become a nightmare. Another big difference is the size of the standard library. On

Some Makefile knowledge does not hurt much, but other than that it starts to become a nightmare. Another big difference is the size of the standard library. One can hold on his brain all the information needed to program in C, but I would argue that for C++ or Java it would be too taxing and an IDE is almost a requirement, the alternative being consulting the documentation often.