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I struggled with C until I learned to hex and assembly program on the 68HC11. Maybe I'm just a moron, but things like pointers for a complete beginner seemed so

by Salgat 2y ago

I struggled with C until I learned to hex and assembly program on the 68HC11. Maybe I'm just a moron, but things like pointers for a complete beginner seemed so abstract and obtuse until I learned how to do indirect addressing in assembly, then suddenly it was painfully obvious why C had pointers and how they worked. Before that I just mostly used Python where it's far more abstracted away. People forget that many features like pointers exist to address hardware/performance limitations, which is not immediately obvious to new devs the "why and what" of what they're actually doing inside the cpu which limits your intuitive understanding.

chungy 2y ago
This is my experience as well, for a lot of features that seem like magic in high level languages. I could somewhat accept pointers even without understanding them, but object-oriented programming with its classes and all was such a mystery to me that I was scared to even try using it. It's not until I learned assembly language that I understood pointers, and from there, I could implement a basic OOP system in C and finally understand what objects are all about. It only clicked when I learned how to do it from scratch.
gxd 2y ago
That's why some people see the C language as "portable assembly". I think C is at its best when you want Assembly-like memory addressing flexibility but don't want to deal with instruction-set specific idiosyncrasies.
tcbawo 2y ago
I have a hypothesis that to move beyond being a consumer of technology to being a producer of technology, modern education in software development should be built on building fundamentals through first principles — especially with kids and young adults. It should be analogous to how we learn counting, arithmetic, and higher level maths. One of the best features of obsolete, constrained architectures was their simplicity. Recovery for something wrong is quick and there is (generally) no permanent damage. All of this makes it much easier to understand what is happening at a lower level. Once you have a basic understanding, then you are ready for the next level of abstraction. I assume that openness and availability of IP is the biggest challenge to putting some kind of curriculum together. I would be highly interested in whether anyone has curated this into a cohesive educational approach, especially one that targets childhood development.

by Salgat 2y ago

chungy 2y ago

This is my experience as well, for a lot of features that seem like magic in high level languages. I could somewhat accept pointers even without understanding them, but object-oriented programming with its classes and all was such a mystery to me that I was scared to even try using it. It's not until I learned assembly language that I understood pointers, and from there, I could implement a basic OOP system in C and finally understand what objects are all about. It only clicked when I learned how to do it from scratch.

gxd 2y ago

That's why some people see the C language as "portable assembly". I think C is at its best when you want Assembly-like memory addressing flexibility but don't want to deal with instruction-set specific idiosyncrasies.

tcbawo 2y ago

I have a hypothesis that to move beyond being a consumer of technology to being a producer of technology, modern education in software development should be built on building fundamentals through first principles — especially with kids and young adults. It should be analogous to how we learn counting, arithmetic, and higher level maths. One of the best features of obsolete, constrained architectures was their simplicity. Recovery for something wrong is quick and there is (generally) no permanent damage. All of this makes it much easier to understand what is happening at a lower level. Once you have a basic understanding, then you are ready for the next level of abstraction. I assume that openness and availability of IP is the biggest challenge to putting some kind of curriculum together. I would be highly interested in whether anyone has curated this into a cohesive educational approach, especially one that targets childhood development.