4 ms·

This is like 100 level C-S stuff, why is this on hacker news?

• niggler 14y ago
  My guess: most people on HN don't have basic C competency.
  • voidlogic 14y ago
    That is pretty scary (and possibly true). If a hacker does not have basic C competency, they probably do not understand how their code, C or otherwise is executed... I'm all for C-S programs having a focus on teaching how to learn, frameworks of understanding and theory, but there need to be a few practical lessons along the way, and C competency is one of those. Maybe things have changed greatly since my undergrad but, the capstone of my undergrad C-S program was writing a C(lite) compiler for MIPS in C. This is in a program where for 60% of the classes the language in use was Java. I think this was a fantastic capstone choice. Students were expected to have deep understanding of C and Java and a working knowledge of Scheme, Haskell, Prolog with HTML/CSS/Javascript never taught due to the expectation you teach them to yourself on the way like everyone else. Depending your electives you might have also picked up C#, Python and Objective-C.
• mitchi 14y ago
  I agree but we get way worse don't we? example : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4745713 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4745713 And the comments so far are interesting.
• 10098 14y ago
  Because it's so much all about dynamically-typed high-level languages today that raw pointers and manual memory management seem old-skool and cool!