4 ms·

I agree that this is the case for casual programming. If you are teaching someone who has hardware experience (electrical engineer, etc), it is sometimes easier

• jules 14y ago
  For the low level stuff an assembly language is way better than C. C is still a LOT of magic that you won't be able to fully understand without understanding how the machine and the compiler works. In assembly a line corresponds to one instruction. What the assembler is doing is translating each line to an instruction number that the machine can interpret. That is a whole lot less magic than what happens in C. In addition, pointers are much easier to understand from a machine perspective than from a C perspective: they are just numbers indicating a location in memory. C makes that far too complicated with different data types, pointers to local variables (and higher up the call stack), confusing pointer declaration syntax, etc. You can learn C syntax for assembly language idioms later. Starting out by learning the concepts plus the syntax at the same time leads to inefficient learning because when you're learning concepts like pointers it doesn't help to have to learn confusing stuff and syntax at the same time. This does not apply to languages that cleanly abstract the machine like Scheme/Python/Haskell/what have you, but C lets the low level stuff shine through so much that you end up having to learn that anyway; you can't really learn it as an abstraction.