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From the article: i [sic] find C to be the language that every first time programmer must learn. Well, yes and no. I say no because, on Windows, C is not one o
by quacker 14y ago
From the article: i [sic] find C to be the language that every first time programmer must learn.
Well, yes and no. I say no because, on Windows, C is not one of the easier languages to set up. I wouldn't recommend Visual Studio (or any IDE), and getting GCC on Windows (MingW or Cygwin or ???) and updating your PATH isn't obvious. And C compiler errors might be cryptic to a new programmer. And C pointers are tricky. Heck, even printf has its gotchas.
On the other hand, I would say that every programmer would benefit from learning C. If you learn C first then you'll have learned all of the above, and that's great. You'll have some understanding of how arrays are stored in memory, what a compiler does, how references work, etc, which are aspects that other languages hide from you.
For the record, I'd probably recommend Python. Python has a binary installer for Windows, it's lighter on syntax, and it has exceptional documentation. You can play around interactively in the interpreter, and it's a language that has a little bit of everything to try: scripting, objects/inheritance, (some) functional features, etc.
- ditoa 14y agoThe TDM GCC installer [1] is great on Windows as it deals with updating the path and even makes a nice shortcut in the start menu. I know a few people who began programming with C (or C++) using TDM-GCC and after a couple of questions asking me about the command prompt they were good to go. To begin with just a gcc -o hello.exe hello.c is all that is needed and as you progress with learning the language the additional params are introduced. As the command line on Windows is extremely simple I have found it easier to teach people how to use the command line than to switch to another browser. They only need to have a basic knowledge half a dozen commands, which can easily be written down, to get started. Also, and sorry if this seems insulting, if someone can't grok the idea of using cd to change a directory (and therefore under what a directory is) they probably are not going to be able to learn to program no matter what the language. [1] http://tdm-gcc.tdragon.net/ http://tdm-gcc.tdragon.net/
- rahul_rstudio 14y agoWhen i started out, i used Turbo C++ Compiler on a Windows 98 system. It was as easy as copy/pasting the TC++ directory and changing the directory path in the compiler settings. It hardly took much time to learn the basics and soon i was enjoying writing some cool logical programs and having a good time :)