12 ms·

Learn C, Then Learn Computer Science

145 points by qrohlf 13y ago

ChuckMcM 13y ago
Don't confuse the strategies :-) Small liberal arts school has a strategy of broad based understanding of theory and the 'art', with graduate school providing the nuts and bolts specialization, large engineering school (USC) has the strategy of maximally skilled in execution of the art with enough theory to be effective. USC will assume that you will go to work right after you get your 4 year degree, Lewis and Clark may be assuming you're going to have at least another 2 years of work on your master's degree to get those bits in order. In my experience, learning how the computer worked made it easier for me to learn to program it. My wife, was much more an algorithmic thinker and could care less if this variable was in a register or not, and focused on how things flowed through the program. I think they are both valid approaches.
- rjzzleep 13y ago
  yes, and a significant portion of our famous scientists studied philosophy and then laid the foundations across multiple disciplines some of which many graduate students still don't understand even though they studied them. i know a whole bunch of people are going to argue pro specialization, but i think we need to rethink the way we teach. we've built efficient workhorse factories which we call universities, and some of the top tier ones are slowly moving away from that system. there are also a lot of known cases where crossdomain talent has brought a perspective which led to a whole bunch of problem solving. but i'm careful with conclusions here, because we know correlation does not imply causality. we're not teaching people, we're indoctrinating them, to a point where your sound reasoning is valueless, because you don't have a ph.d in the domain you talk about. what's tested in your university exams is not whether you're good at something, it's how good we can recite the things that have been taught to us. it's a system that carries from primary school to everything else. somewhat related is also this gem, someone posted on hn before http://pauli.uni-muenster.de/~munsteg/arnold.html http://pauli.uni-muenster.de/~munsteg/arnold.html EDIT: you might wonder how that is related. one example: i struggled during the universities architectural classes. even though having grown up reading intel platform references and looking at disassembled c/c++ and delphi code i understood memory layouts, threading, pipelining much better than anyone else in the class. i also spent a lot of time learning basic mips architectures. the problem was that none of that really helped me to do well on the exams. the reasoning behind it, is that class is structure in a way so that once you learn the theory behind it, you'll have a reference point once you actually need to do something in that domain. that reasoning is in fact sound, but only if we assume that no one actually knows what they want to do. > In my experience, learning how the computer worked made it easier for me to learn to program it yes, but the question is, do you need university to tell you that?
  - ChuckMcM 13y ago
    > yes, but the question is, do you need university to tell you that? Of course not, anyone can tell you that. But knowing who told you what you know, sometimes helps a third party evaluate your statements of knowledge :-)
    - faceyspacey 13y ago
      i can't believe anyone actually learned this stuff in school. i can't believe there is any debate about it. all the truly good programmers/engineers/computer_scientists/whatever_the_fuck_you_want_to_call_us learn the vast majority of what we know on our own (even if some of us did go to school for it). We do so because of curiosity and determination to make ground-breaking stuff, which we intrinsically know comes from understanding every single damn thing about computers from the metal up to javascript. CS in schools, at least past required k-12 education, is for people not sure of what they want to do--so we should frame the conversation about how to make CS courses to hook them or something. To me it's just a lame topic. I mean it's a valid one, but the idea of passionate programmers from hacker news in any way, like, looking up to school as any sort of answer is just some bitch ass shit. If you're sure you want to be a developer, get to work son, and zone out on your computer. That's the appropriate stance. Stop looking to institutions for answers.
- RogerL 13y ago
  "I think they are both valid approaches." For limited ranges of valid. If you are implementing a low performance requirement CRUD app, certainly you can become an effective programmer without knowing the low level details. But if you want to be an engineer? Good luck. I've worked with people that didn't know the stuff behind C, and they are pretty useless as soon as performance matters, or you need to talk to hardware, or crank through a lot of numerical computations, minimize watt usage of a cellphone, app, debug complicated situations, and so on. They don't have a good mental model of the machine in their mind, and so they cannot figure out what is going on, reason about the performance of a modern chip, and so on. There are a lot of arguments for expediency on HN. Probably it is partially justified, but I will always advocate for an engineering education, as opposed to a 'learn rails in 3 weeks and get a job' approach. Education and knowledge enables you to tackle any problem that comes your way. So, while you can learn to be an effective debugger of a Python script (say) and so on without detailed knowledge of the machine, mastering the fundamentals will make you an effective debugger and enable you to do so much more. To stick with the python, what happens if the python implementation is buggy? There is a large subset of programmers that can not cope with that situation. Why limit yourself? If this is going to be your career, the way you pay your mortgage, feed your kids, and so on, invest in yourself. I'm having trouble of thinking of the downside of acquiring the knowledge, but I can trivially think of the upside.
  - actsasbuffoon 13y ago
    There are advantages to the other side. Many fascinating developments were made possible by those who prefer to think functionally, as opposed to imperatively. Modern relational database engines are fairly easy to implement once you understand set theory. Lambda calculus has taught me how to create a linked list using nothing but partially applied higher order functions. Software transactional memory was invented in Haskell, and it's easy to see why it happened there first. The world needs people who think mechanically as well as people who think at a very high level of abstraction. I'm glad people like you exist, as tech would be vastly behind where it is now otherwise. I'm also glad there are people like me. We may not always see problems the same way, but the world is a better place because of our differences.
- 3rd3 13y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw#t=50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw#t=50 Or typo?
mgmeyers 13y ago
Does any one know of any good self study resources (or online courses) on this subject?
- dobbsbob 13y ago
  The C Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie (Kernighan has 2 other good programming books too) and/or look around youtube for tutorials on C. MIT has this online, lecture notes were good enough for me plus K&R book http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-087-practical-programming-in-c-january-iap-2010/lecture-notes/ http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput... This is a good course about architecture http://www.nand2tetris.org/course.php http://www.nand2tetris.org/course.php
  - dmunoz 13y ago
    > look around youtube for tutorials on C This is likely to be horrible advice. I don't doubt that there are good C tutorials on youtube, but there are probably also hundreds of extremely poor tutorials that are seductive and even highly rated because the people rating don't know better. K&R C is excellent. I don't like overbearing advice, but "Every serious programmer should read K&R C" isn't bad as far as such advice goes. I don't particularly like the "Learn X The Hard Way" series (maybe it is the right way, but I find it too painful), but there is Learn C The Hard Way [0]. [0] http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/ http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/
- omnibrain 13y ago
  I currently follow this course: http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/ http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/ I'm at exercise 19 and enjoy it so far. I think I already learned a lot. It may not suite everybody and I don't even know if it's good, though.
- stefantalpalaru 13y ago
  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/562303/the-definitive-c-book-guide-and-list http://stackoverflow.com/questions/562303/the-definitive-c-b...
UNIXgod 13y ago
Lean C when you need to grok how memory works in computing. Learn Scheme to grok the science of computing. Learn BSD when you want to understand operating systems and the network stack. Grok engineering when you write a scheme->c translator running on BSD.
- banachtarski 13y ago
  This feels highly prescriptive.
  - anaphor 13y ago
    It's mostly true though, especially about BSD. The BSD TCP/IP stack code is used for teaching about network stack implementations, and Scheme is extremely useful for exploring theoretical ideas.
- hobbyist 13y ago
  Could you elaborate more or give some references on the second and third part? I am done with the first. I seriously need some profound knowledge on second and third, which a lot of people like you talk about. I need to put a plan to get there too. Scheme to C looks fun though :-) . Where should I start first with?
  - gamegoblin 13y ago
    If you want to implement Scheme in C, I'd take a look at Scheme From Scratch (http://michaux.ca/articles/scheme-from-scratch-bootstrap-v0_1-integers http://michaux.ca/articles/scheme-from-scratch-bootstrap-v0_...) It's pretty excellent for learning how to implement a simple language in C.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    Do yourself a service and write the Scheme compiler in Scheme itself, doing direct assembly code generation. http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf Also a nice way to learn about bootstraping compilers. Generating code code for another OS without Scheme support is just a matter of having your compiler cross-compile to the other OS. Then use the fresh backed compiler to re-compile your compiler in the new OS.
anaphor 13y ago
"The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large." -- Don Knuth
betterunix 13y ago
Personally I take a different view: learn a high-level language, use it to study computer science, and if you feel like writing some low-level code go ahead and learn C (though even then, you could probably do better by bootstrapping a compiler for your favorite high-level language and adding some extensions for low-level operations). C is not the best or even a particularly good language to try to learn abstract CS concepts with, professors who choose it are needlessly stressing out their students, and at the end of the day you can learn a lot more about algorithms and data structures when you are not busy worrying about pointers or trying to avoid the things that "everyone knows to avoid" (except people keep failing to do so). I say this as someone who watched the catastrophic results of trying to use C++ as a language to teach data structures. It is far more important to be able to think abstractly than to know how to deal with pointers.
- banachtarski 13y ago
  The thing that makes C a good candidate is that it's a very very small language. Yes there are plenty of strange quirks that the experts need to deal with but you can come up with an elegant and compact implementation of every standard data structure. High level languages tend to favor one data structure over another. Starting with those languages can give students the "hammer syndrome" w.r.t. that structure.
  - anaphor 13y ago
    I see this a lot with functional programmers and linked lists. Yeah you can derive a lot of data structures from a list, but sometimes it's like putting a square peg into a round hole, and a custom data structure would be more efficient.
    - nbouscal 13y ago
      As far as I can tell, only hobbyist functional programmers try to make everything work with linked lists. Most people who write in functional languages professionally know to use the correct data structure for the job, and how to do so (the most common educational resource being Okasaki's Purely Functional Data Structures).
yoha 13y ago
It really depends on what you're aiming for. - pure mathematical stuff, graphs and such, you can skip programming - making algorithms/protocols/etc by simple models require to understand what a computer can do, etc so learn at least Python - making new architectures, efficient functions (like for crypto), go to C. I am suggesting Python, because it is probably the simplest programming language to learn. I'm not saying that learning Python when you do purely theoretical stuff is useless, just that you can skip it and still work. Event if you do no CS-related things, programming is useful. tl;dr: go for Python, unless you need to now the specific workings of a computer
- betterunix 13y ago
  "I am suggesting Python, because it is probably the simplest programming language to learn." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_%28programming_language%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_%28programming_language... (Otherwise I agree, start with something like this to learn CS)
pjmlp 13y ago
Please don't! Learn Delphi/Object Pascal, Ada, Modula-2, Rust and discover control over memory managerment doesn't require throwing safety out of the window. Performance can be fine-tuned to the 1% hotspots that really require playing dirty tricks. That there are modular systems programming languages with compile times times that leave C to shame. Then cry as you are forced to adopt C to be understood by the rest of the world.
- kabdib 13y ago
  The problem being, if you show up and all you know is Delphi / Pascal / Ada, you're going to be unemployable. [I'm a veteran of a ton of Object Pascal, btw. Done some Delphi, too -- it was nice. But.] In general, pushing a niche language as The One does not do a beginner a service. Delphi has never been more than a niche. We had a guy at Apple decide to do his project in Oberon. Super smart guy who pretty good work. He wound up getting fired because it wasn't a smart choice for the people around him who had to take over the code. I don't know why some people over-index on programming language. You use what's appropriate. If you're working alone, do whatever floats your boat. If you're on a team, using the Latest Shiny Thing or The Most Correct Safest Thing may not be the best choice. If you're a student, using your professor's favorite language (we used to call these little pet horrors PL/Prof or PROF-TRAN) outside of the course is probably a bad choice -- you want to learn what the market is, and you need to know what the weak points of your chosen language are. It's particularly poignant to see "Java only" kids come out of school who are utterly ignorant of memory models, barely know what XOR is, and who can only express themselves in terms of classes and interfaces. There's more to life than that.
  - Avshalom 13y ago
    The problem is that unless enough people make a conscious decision otherwise the 30-40 years of C libraries/collected-knowledge means it's always "what's appropriate" even in cases where no: fortran, ada, pascal... forth/lisp/whatever-you-have-that-can-talk-to-metal would actually be more (or as) appropriate.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    > The problem being, if you show up and all you know is Delphi / Pascal / Ada, you're going to be unemployable. Sure, it is all about learning for the job I guess. My rant goes into another direction actually. Young kinds nowadays tend to think that not only C is the only player on its field, it never existed nothing else before it. Whereas many of us, remember the days when C was just another systems programming languages among many others to choose from. So if they learn only C, then they get into this mentalit that bounds checkings, modules, proper vectors belongs to the realm of VM languages, while only C allow for full control. If on the other hand they learn about the Algol family of systems programming languages, besides C, they will be aware of other languages that offer the same feature set of C, compile to native code as well, while offering higher productivity. Having that knowledge will make them better C programmers as well, as they might learn a better sense of safety and disciple while coding C.
fantnn 13y ago
>I'm an undergraduate studying computer science andddd that's as far as I made it
michaelochurch 13y ago
Learn C and learn computer science. Let's get away from subjective "shoulds" and talk about practical stuff. You want to learn things, as much as possible, that (a) are likely to remain useful in 15 years and (b) are going to qualify you for the highest quality of jobs. C, as a language, passes this test. So do the fundamentals of computer science; they may not bring you quantity in job opportunities, but they'll give you access to quality. Aside from that? Well, it's hard to predict the future. I can't make individual calls. Who would have thought JavaScript would be so popular in 2014? The whole language is a hack. But if you learned it in 2000, you still have a high-demand skill set. Learning one thing or one small set of things won't do, though. You need to future-proof yourself with a wider knowledge portfolio, and very few jobs will teach a person to do that. On the other hand, if you learn a lot of useless and parochial crap that won't generalize (i.e. the quirks of your own corporate codebase) you get to a semi-depressed state of "learnout" (you struggle to assimilate new things, because you've filled your brain with unrewarding crap) and that's no good either.
- dclara 13y ago
  "The whole language is a hack." Interesting enough that it is a must for the web development although it's lacking the structure definition from CS point of view. How about other scripting languages, such as Python or Ruby?
  - ForHackernews 13y ago
    Python is growing in importance in scientific computing, displacing languages like R, MATLAB, and Fortran (yes, Fortran). There's a pretty good chance it will still be in wide use in science in 10-15 years. Ruby is harder to predict. It seems like a lot of the web developers who would have used Rails a few years ago are now opting for server-side javascript, based in node.js.
    - dclara 13y ago
      Thank you. But do you mean Julia to replace R, Matlab and Fortran?
gpcz 13y ago
Joel Spolsky wrote a good article about this called "Back to Basics" (src: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html ). My favorite quote from it (capitalization modified) is, "If you want to teach somebody something well, you have to start at the very lowest level. It's like Karate Kid. Wax on, wax off. Wax on, wax off. Do that for three weeks. Then knocking the other kid's head off is easy."
NAFV_P 13y ago
> This semester I used function pointers in an assignment and later heard them described as “Quinn’s magic C voodoo”. I still think I have to polish up on 'em: #include <stdio.h> #include <ctype.h> // int chk_arg(char *s, int (*f)(int)) { while(*s) if(!(f(*s))) return 1; else ++s; return 0; } // char *s[]= { "1048leet576", "numbers only pls\n" }; if(chk_arg(*s, isdigit)) printf(*(s+1)); > This was confusing - my classmates were juniors and seniors who were 3+ years into a computer science degree, yet many of them didn’t seem to have an understanding of how computers worked. They could write high-level code and analyze algorithms, but had never used malloc. What the hell, CS students who haven't used malloc? I've got no formal background in CS, yesterday I wrote a binary search tree in C that passed valgrind.
- moccajoghurt 13y ago
  I am positive that 95% of the CS students with a BSc. degree in my college haven't even seen function pointers. We learn the basics of C then OOP in C++ and the rest of the study will be Java. It's a farce and as an employer I wouldn't even care whether my employee has a fancy degree. You won't find real coders if you choose them by their degree. At least in Germany it's like that. I am not sure of it's different in other countries.
  - NAFV_P 13y ago
    > At least in Germany it's like that. I am not sure of it's different in other countries. I get the impression it is the same situation in the UK. It's nice knowing I can do a dozen rounds with a CS graduate.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    I am a Portuguese living in Germany and every time someone describes me how CS degrees work here, I always feel sorry for my work colleagues. When I took my degree in Portugal in the mid-90's, it was a 5 year long degree, with heavy mix of theory and practical subjects in lots of programming languages. I got to use C, C++, Prolog, Camllight, Java, PL/I, Algol, Pascal as compulsory ones. Plus many many others that I got to learn/use as part of the compiler design lectures I used to attend to. All CS areas had introductory levels as compulsory, with the more advanced ones as optional subjects. Given the way the credits were set up, quite a few of those advanced ones were also required.
Kapura 13y ago
This article resonated deeply with my own experience. Like Rohlf, I learned to program TI-Basic in middle school, and like him, I've had the ability to see several different teaching paradigms when it comes to computer science. In the high school computer science courses I was able to take, the programs were relatively simple with an, in my opinion, too-overt emphasis on object oriented programming. It was in java, and very little of the class focused on the "how" aspect of the language. My first CS courses at university were in Ada. I don't know how many of y'all have programmed in Ada, but I think about it like a wordier C that doesn't let you just get away with shit because it's strongly typed. This was the language we were taught basic control structures in and, to be fair, the way we were taught focused on good styling so that our code would be unreadable mush. The UNIX class was in C, and it is, in my opinion, the most rigorous course that most of the students will take on their way to the bachelor's degree. The students build, across a series of projects, a shell that can execute commands and run simple scripts. The sorts of problems encountered introduce the students to the nature of C at a very low level, as well as the sorts of structures that can be used to solve practical problems. Many of the high level more theoretical classes are language-agnostic, and many of the students use either Python or C#. I think that it's good that these higher-level theoretical classes allow us to choose our own language, because I think that the ways in which different programmers attack the same problem might bias them towards one or another language. Recently, the lower-level classes had their programming language changed. Heeding the argument that Ada wasn't super relevant in the higher-level classes, the faculty changed the language to Python. This was, I think, a mistake. My opinion is that the lower level classes should be taught in C for many of the same reasons Rohlf mentioned. I think it's important that the students have an idea of how their data is being represented on the disk so that they could better understand the costs associated with certain tasks. The best argument that I heard for Python was that not everybody taking these into classes go on to write the sort of code that requires something fast or efficient. Python makes data processing easy, which is really the most important thing that students should learn in intro-to-programming classes. I'd say this is a fair point.
- GuiA 13y ago
  I have a similar experience, and agree with your sentiment. I taught myself TI-Basic in the 7th grade. Then when I was really fluent in it and started hitting its limits around the 9th grade (I was mostly interesting in writing real time games), I picked up z80 assembly. Later (10th grade) I wanted to write programs on my computer, I installed Linux and learned C (not that they're related, but the hacker world really intrigued me. It also means that I spent my first "real" programming years as a member of the broad Linux community; I even submitted patches to large FOSS projects like Gnome, which still shapes me as an engineer to this day). Then in university we used Ada for algorithms/application programming the first semester (partly because I'm French, and French professors love the fact that Ada is French; and partly for the reasons parent poster mentioned), before transitioning to C (at first for Unix programming, and then more general programming), and finally doing C++/Java in our final year (we also had a few domain specific classes where we used a different language: SQL for databases, assembly for electrical engineering, PHP for webdev, etc.). I really like the progression I followed, as I feel like it was logically consistent, exposed me to a lot of different aspects of computer science, and forged me into a fairly solid programmer. I've tutored students whose first language was Java, and their mental model of programming/computer science was a big mess. The best of them figured things out a year or so in, but a lot of them remained confused throughout their college years. Now I volunteer with a program that teaches kids how to program, and we use Ruby. I think Ruby/Python are great for giving beginners a taste of programming; and it's enough for the kids who don't fall in love with it. But with the kids for whom programming just clicks and is clearly going to be their field of predilection as a teenarger/college student, I'm starting to believe that C (ideally on an Unix system) is the way to go.
habosa 13y ago
I think C is a great language to teach someone why all of the CS theory matters. When you write Java, almost everything you do will "work" and it will probably run pretty fast on your Core i7. When you write C you have to be much more deliberate. There's no massive standard library to do arr.sort() for you and you have to really think about how to implement some basic processes that you took for granted. I think C made me a much better Java programnmer because I now understand what the most minimal way to complete a task can be. No more HashMap<String, ArrayList<Object>> once you've played with structs and C arrays.
- tbirdz 13y ago
  "There's no massive standard library to do arr.sort() for you and you have to really think about how to implement some basic processes that you took for granted" Not massive by any means, but the C standard library does include qsort() (quicksort) in stdlib.h
blahbl4hblahtoo 13y ago
Lots of people confuse learning to code in C with learning how hardware works. Its close in some ways but not all. EDIT: WOW. I'm amazed at how many people think that C is "how memory works". Just wow. This is one of those things where you're confusing the map for the territory and ascribing value to something because its "hard". C is a fairly high level abstraction for interacting with a computer...i know that everyone has heard that c is close to being assembler...but what you are forgetting is that assembler is also an abstraction over operands. The reason i think its important to point this out is that malloc and free arent magical. Othér techniques are just as valid and the notion of "low level" is misleading. C makes tradeoffs that actually give rise to all of the vulnerabilities and stability problems in all the software that you have ever used. Those tradeoffs are REAL and just because lots of you get this macho nonsense about not using safe collection types everyone on the planet has to deal with malware. So many of you buy your own bullshit at an astonishing level...its really breathtaking to see how many of you cant see the built in assumptions in what you are saying.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- ufo 13y ago
  At this point, the only thing that still keeps C close to the hardware is that they need to keep the hardware close to C model because of all the legacy code in the world. Most recent hardware innovations, like pipelining, speculative code execution, SIMD, etc are not easily expressed in C. Additionally, C was written in a time where accessing the memory was cheap and had a uniform cost - nowadays memory access times vary immensely depending on if its cached or not.
  - blahbl4hblahtoo 13y ago
    right on my knowledgeable homie...
- smorrow 13y ago
  To elaborate on this... malloc and free aren't even a part of C itself. Other than static (globals and "static" the keyword) and automatic (stack) allocation there isn't any memory management in C itself. malloc and free are library functions wrapping system calls. That's something to do with the operating system - the machine itself has NOTHING like malloc and free. I and many people know C but know fuck all about assembly programming. (for now)
gwu78 13y ago
To truly appreciate C I think having to program in assembly first helps. I say learn assembly first, then learn C. Then do whatever you want.
- moccajoghurt 13y ago
  On the other hand... give a student python in the first semester and he'll get hooked. In the second semester you can start the approach you proposed.
garrettdreyfus 13y ago
I learned to program in python, and later in front end web development languages such as js, css, and html. I have recently started to learn about operating systems, with the eventual goal to contribute to the Linux kernel. Before now I had never touched C. I ran into very similar problems. My first C program forked a child, its child initiated a shared memory object, wrote a collatz sequence to it and exited. Then the parent read and printed from the memory object. It took over 2 hours because C was so alien to me.
was_hellbanned 13y ago
I think we need to break all of this down into at least three entirely separate areas: 1) Computer Science, which is, in my opinion, entirely a subset of mathematics, and should be taught as such. 2) Coding, which is the ability to break a problem down and describe it in a series of simple steps. 3) Craft and application, which is everything about how to use tools, best practices for code architecture, and everything else that every new graduate is usually terrible at. I think we could satisfy most of the world's need for "programmers" by teaching #2 and #3 in a trade school model.
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  The problem here appears when you want to teach #1. You shouldn't do it without also teaching #2 and #3 (isn't that obvious enough?), but #3 is often out, and it seems that there are some people trying to not "lose time" with #2 either.
  - was_hellbanned 13y ago
    I would say someone on a full CS-and-engineering track should study #2 (intro), #1 (rigorous CS/math), and finish with #3, since that's where you want to focus on the latest industry standards and trends. This is similar to my own CS university experience, but I'd like to see it broken out into much better defined areas, with different ratios of focus for different career tracks. I also think a full program should take significantly longer than a 4-year degree. Incidentally, I think #1 could easily be taught without #3 at all. I get the impression that there are quite a few academic people who tinker with interesting algorithmic work, in esoteric languages, who couldn't effectively write maintainable code for mass deployment. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just a different area of specialization.
knappador 13y ago
My recipe for the best possible syllabus for CS 103: * Turing machine -- just the tape and making it do the equivalent of procedures so that we can compose things. Brainfuck is a valid homework medium. * A relevant ISA such as ARM -- We can let Thumb/2 be bonus points, but the real goal is just to convey that ISA's are usually written to take the most generally abstractable things you would do with a Turing machine and do it more succinctly and faster in hardware. * Build a function stack with the goal of understanding how procedures become generalized by calling conventions or optimized by inlining. The lesson is that we stay pure for flexibility and get dirty for raw speed. * Introduce Scheme and tail recursion optimization. Now the whole of functional programming and the abstractions -- and their optimizations -- are opened up with a firm footing in the machine. Turing and Church probably did write most of CS, so it's obvious that you want to relate the two to create the most generally useful bridge concepts for the rest of the long life of a programmer, that if they never let up, will inevitably touch both high-level and low-level languages. OS's are the final frontier here, but cannot possibly be squeezed down due to things like MMU functionality totally clouding up what is what. Making a machine look like it belongs to the program is what OS's are good at, and this is a different kind of abstraction to grok than the relationship between the machine and the programmer.
bmoresbest55 13y ago
I am a recent graduate of CS and completed a year of C after my first year in Java. Then finished the final two years in something of interest and software development courses. I had the ability to do this at a single school and feel I got a full education in terms of covering a large area of study and understanding coding as well as the science behind it. I do however still feel overwhelmed at times and am constantly learning. Lynda for language basics because languages are cool and Two Scoops because Python and Django are awesome.
dljsjr 13y ago
I'm not convinced that these things need to be mutually exclusive. In the CS department at my university, the only language used for the first 3 years is C. But all of the courses are split in to a "lecture" and "lab" component. In lecture you learn about Computer Science; you learn data structures, algorithms, computational complexity, graph theory, proofs, summations, stats, combinatorics, etc. In lab you learn Programming; you implement a lot of these algorithms and data structures in C. Abstract vs. Concrete Data Types are introduced very early as representations for the theoretical structures discussed in class and then we are given projects that can be solved using concepts and theorems introduced with the expectation that we will implement the appropriate structures and algorithms in C. The code itself is read over carefully and just as important as whether the output is good. Now, this is partially a luxury afforded by my university's small size; freshman and sophomore CS classes aren't taught in 200 person lecture halls, they're 30-40 students at the max. My first exposure to a linked list was writing one in C, not using one in Lisp. You model them, write proofs, recurrence relations, graphs, etc. on exams, and implement them in projects so that you show an aptitude for both the theory and the mechanics. By the time you hit your fourth year, you take Programming Languages and Theory of Computation. Automata/Machines, Grammars, BNF, Compilers, etc. in lecture; seeing these concepts applied by studying and writing code in OO languages, LISPs, and Prologs in lab. And you'd sure as hell better understand how the garbage collector in your favorite high level language works or you'll get hosed on the exam. There's other staples mixed in of course; a whole semester devoted to Java/OO (I think a whole semester devoted to functional programming and Lisp would be better, but that's another story). A semester of OS, a semester of Networking. But just focusing on the whole programming/vs science side of it, there's no reason they can't both be taught effectively.
- YZF 13y ago
  And how did that work? I'm just trying to imagine those first year students staring at those segmentation faults or trying to decipher some other non-intuitive C behaviour (promotion rules, = vs. ==, pointer arithmetics, various implicit rules). Talk about being thrown into the deep end of the pool to swim... When a language like Pascal is taught as a first language students can focus on the mechanics of their algorithms rather than struggling with language oddities and machine architecture. I think that's important for new programmers to be able to focus on the flow and mechanics without worrying about other details. Once you get that you can "advance" to things that leak more of the underlying architecture into your program. There are probably many other languages that fit that bill. EDIT (replying to jkrems): E.g. in C if(a=1) assigns 1 to a. I think some modern compilers at least warn on this but they didn't use to and it's perfectly legal. You can't do this in Pascal. You can still make a mistake but you'll get a compiler error. This is a very common mistake for beginners...
YZF 13y ago
I would argue C is a difficult first language. It's even a difficult 2nd or 3rd language. I would start people off programming at a higher level of abstraction and once they can do that dive into how things work. You could start the other way but it may be too theoretical and discouraging. Pascal used to be the language of choice and IMO can still work well. Things got more complicated when we got all those competing paradigms and now you have a matrix of language/paradigm. Should you teach OO? Functional? Procedural? I also think it's important to lay our some theoretical foundations as you're teaching the first language. You don't want to overdo it but you need to start building some basic ideas, notations, concepts. As long as it doesn't get in people's way in their ability to actually build something... If you want to understand how computers work there's no substitute for programming in assembler, preferably, under different hardware architectures. This debate about how to teach programming/CS/software engineering is endless. Different people and different schools have different goals and different capabilities. A well rounded software engineer definitely needs to have a good mix of theory and practice. A CS researcher needs a different perhaps mix.
- vinceguidry 13y ago
  C is an excellent 2nd language. The language itself is obtuse, but the underlying model is fairly simple. C++ is a horrible one. These days, probably nobody should learn C++ and should probably pick up Go instead. As a teenager, I picked up a book on C++ having already learned BASIC, Pascal, and MS-DOS but never got proficient in it. I should have picked C. The "++" lead me to believe that it was a better language than C and I didn't have any real programmers around to tell me otherwise. Oh the missed opportunities...
  - YZF 13y ago
    C++ has many followers but it's a multi-headed beast and some of it can be much harder to grasp. I think it's easier to argue that it's better than C; all you need to do is to look at C code that tries to implement some patterns that are more naturally expressed in C++. Go isn't really a substitute for C++ but one might argue D is. Sounds like C++ and you didn't quite work out. I'd still encourage trying to figure out how some pieces of C++ can improve your C code and use those. You're welcome to stick to C in the rest of your code. A lot of "real programmers" do use C++ successfully and a lot of software you use has C++ in it's DNA... EDIT: (That said I would only expose new students to C++ after they've seen C and some higher level language so they can appreciate the niche that it fills)
rismay 13y ago
Good stuff. However, I don't think that "learning to code," ins being used in the same sense that Terence Eden meant. I think what Quinn Rohlf is trying to say is, "Learn how computers work." And what Eden is trying to say is, "Learn how to be logical." And for a hat trick of HNs submissions, what Andrew Wulf is trying to say over at thecodist.com is that in general you should just, "Learn how to keep learning." Taken as a sum of collective knowledge, I think everyone is right in this case. I think the general idea people are trying to get at is this: 1. To work in technology, you must love learning. (Don't get steamrolled). 2. To work in technology, you should know how computers really work. (Learn about C.) 3. Working in technology is not about learning where to but the curly brackets. It's about learning how to think logically. (Learn Computer Science.) In this sense, I think a great way to get started is by working on a project that you love and in a medium you love. Then as you start hitting limits, descend to C and learn algorithms.
dylandrop 13y ago
In my time as a CS student, I've never needed to use C nor understand its syntax to get through my classes. I think you're confusing the necessity of learning C with understanding how a computer works, and the two are not the same. I think the most useful class I took that explained this (in my sophomore year) was a class on digital logic and micro-architecture. Just about every school I know teaches some class like this early on in your education (at least teaching the basics -- gates, latches, flip-flops, adders, etc.) In mine, it even carried up through some basic assembly code. This class gave me enough to know how computers are working at a fundamental level to be able to use that to my advantage when implementing projects. Lastly -- you're getting a CS degree, not a programming degree from a vocational school. Does everyone who researches... quantum computing, or natural language processing, or graph theory have to know and communicate in C? I think there are other pursuits beyond programming that you get from a CS degree, and to say it's necessary to learn C pivots your school closer to a vocational school. Not that that's bad -- it's just different than what you signed up for.
mathattack 13y ago
From personal experience, I learned theory and structure first. It took a long time to "get" variables as locations in memory, and I had to relearn it many times. Harvard (who sends a lot of people on to PhDs) forces everyone to learn C in introductory cs50. I like how they do it. If you don't get "the machine" early it is hard to get it later.
austinz 13y ago
I come from an EE background, so I learned C and studied various aspects of computer hardware and computer architecture to some relative level of detail before doing any sort of algorithms or software design. Sometimes I wonder what sort of software engineer I'd be if I had gone the other way - studied CS to start off and then descended down the stack later on. Would I be better? Worse? How would I think about problems, and what mental models would I go for first?
- erichocean 13y ago
  I've wondered the same, but in the reverse direction: by the time I started programming, I had read—not kidding—thousands of papers on computer science, and read hundreds of books. I just had no interest in coding. (Or math for that matter, though ironically, I also read math books.) Anyway, I've always wondered if I'm a better or worse CTO for having taken that route. I do know I code much less than my peers, even though (it seems to me) I get much better results with far less coding effort.
  - erichocean 13y ago
    I'm not sure why, but this comment stuck with me and I kept thinking about it. Here's an example of where I think learning CS, then programming, helped. I had written my own JavaScript application framework, called Blossom[0], and I wanted "real physics". I took a look at the various 2D physics ports that had been made to JavaScript, and they all had pretty bad performance. Also, I knew from my work as a filmmaker that "real physics" is actually a pain in the ass, because what you actually want is directable physics that feel real. (Stick with me, I'm getting there...) So, I took a step back and determined that what I wanted was to be able to use tween curves like normal, but have the actual path that was taken depend on the velocity and/or acceleration of the movement when the user released their finger, yet be "directed" according to the tween curve. That required doing math, specifically, getting first and second derivatives from your tween curves. Yuck. Except, CS to the rescue, there are these things called Dual numbers[1], and when you use them, you get automatic differentiation[2] for free, without having to rewrite your code. So I wrote a Dual number implementation for JavaScript, grabbed a JS parser and rewrote the tween functions at load time (i.e. with code, automatically) to use the Dual numbers so that I could extract the velocity and acceleration. I then took the original curve based on the user's movement, blended it with the tween derivatives, and the resulting animations were actually really great. The whole thing was efficient enough to get real time performance on an iPad 3 in mobile Safari, entirely in JavaScript. And the total time from start of work to the physics-based Dual-number tween animations in Blossom? Two days, and about 2K LOC. If I hadn't know about Dual numbers, there's no way I'd have gotten there just by sitting down and programming, and who knows how long it took the FB team to do the dynamics for FB Home, or the Apple team to add UI Dynamics to iOS 7. My guess is that it took longer than two days... [0] https://github.com/erichocean/blossom https://github.com/erichocean/blossom [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_number [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_differentiation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_differentiation
icedchai 13y ago
I'm biased, since I taught myself C when I was a teenager. My first language was BASIC (first on the Apple II, then the Amiga.) When I got to high school, they were teaching Pascal on old 8086's. It felt like such a step backwards. This was back in the early 90's. When I go to college, I was able to opt out of the first couple of intro CS classes (and get credit for them) by taking a test or two.
madmax96 13y ago
Terence Eden was saying the same thing that this post said, which is why I was confused at the contradictory tone in this article. It's vital to a good computer science education to understand pointers at a hardware level, differences between stack and heap variables, etc. It's a tragedy that the students at Lewis and Clark looked at pointers to functions and thought voodoo, but it would also be wrong to only teach them the low level stuff, since there most certainly is enough to fill a college experience with. That being said, the only thing that seems missing at Lewis and Clark was a good introductory course. A good background on what languages are doing behind the scenes, as provided by something like C, is a part of computer science and is necessary for a thorough understanding of the subject. It just seems like all the issues talked about were computer science issues.
xarien 13y ago
You're essentially advocating for a bottoms up approach as opposed to a top down approach (albeit in a pretty confusing manner). Both work for different people and circumstances. Personally, I think C is a bit high level for a true bottoms up approach which is more inline with a computer engineering education as opposed to a CS program from a liberal arts college. A good approach is one I experienced while attending a tier 1 eng school over a decade ago: using ASM of a simple simulated cpu with a small instruction set(risc or cisc doesn't really matter although imo risc is by far easier to pick up for less experienced individuals).
niio 13y ago
ignore this, using it to "save" article.
frou_dh 13y ago
I find the notion of syscalls as the interface to an OS more intriguing than the world according to C. C as it stands may be ubiquitous, but other languages can conceivably be implemented as peers to it (rather than on top of it - it took me far too long to realise that). It's fundamental neither on bare metal nor in the presence of an OS.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  Yep, when C was mainly a UNIX only language, there were another ones to choose from. With UNIXs spread into the enterprise, C started to gain weight. If UNIX hadn't been successful, it would just be yet another language.
maaarghk 13y ago
Hey, it sounds like if you write a book, I'll buy it ;P

145 points by qrohlf 13y ago

Don't confuse the strategies :-) Small liberal arts school has a strategy of broad based understanding of theory and the 'art', with graduate school providing the nuts and bolts specialization, large engineering school (USC) has the strategy of maximally skilled in execution of the art with enough theory to be effective. USC will assume that you will go to work right after you get your 4 year degree, Lewis and Clark may be assuming you're going to have at least another 2 years of work on your master's degree to get those bits in order. In my experience, learning how the computer worked made it easier for me to learn to program it. My wife, was much more an algorithmic thinker and could care less if this variable was in a register or not, and focused on how things flowed through the program. I think they are both valid approaches.

rjzzleep 13y ago
yes, and a significant portion of our famous scientists studied philosophy and then laid the foundations across multiple disciplines some of which many graduate students still don't understand even though they studied them. i know a whole bunch of people are going to argue pro specialization, but i think we need to rethink the way we teach. we've built efficient workhorse factories which we call universities, and some of the top tier ones are slowly moving away from that system. there are also a lot of known cases where crossdomain talent has brought a perspective which led to a whole bunch of problem solving. but i'm careful with conclusions here, because we know correlation does not imply causality. we're not teaching people, we're indoctrinating them, to a point where your sound reasoning is valueless, because you don't have a ph.d in the domain you talk about. what's tested in your university exams is not whether you're good at something, it's how good we can recite the things that have been taught to us. it's a system that carries from primary school to everything else. somewhat related is also this gem, someone posted on hn before http://pauli.uni-muenster.de/~munsteg/arnold.html http://pauli.uni-muenster.de/~munsteg/arnold.html EDIT: you might wonder how that is related. one example: i struggled during the universities architectural classes. even though having grown up reading intel platform references and looking at disassembled c/c++ and delphi code i understood memory layouts, threading, pipelining much better than anyone else in the class. i also spent a lot of time learning basic mips architectures. the problem was that none of that really helped me to do well on the exams. the reasoning behind it, is that class is structure in a way so that once you learn the theory behind it, you'll have a reference point once you actually need to do something in that domain. that reasoning is in fact sound, but only if we assume that no one actually knows what they want to do. > In my experience, learning how the computer worked made it easier for me to learn to program it yes, but the question is, do you need university to tell you that?
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  > yes, but the question is, do you need university to tell you that? Of course not, anyone can tell you that. But knowing who told you what you know, sometimes helps a third party evaluate your statements of knowledge :-)
  - faceyspacey 13y ago
    i can't believe anyone actually learned this stuff in school. i can't believe there is any debate about it. all the truly good programmers/engineers/computer_scientists/whatever_the_fuck_you_want_to_call_us learn the vast majority of what we know on our own (even if some of us did go to school for it). We do so because of curiosity and determination to make ground-breaking stuff, which we intrinsically know comes from understanding every single damn thing about computers from the metal up to javascript. CS in schools, at least past required k-12 education, is for people not sure of what they want to do--so we should frame the conversation about how to make CS courses to hook them or something. To me it's just a lame topic. I mean it's a valid one, but the idea of passionate programmers from hacker news in any way, like, looking up to school as any sort of answer is just some bitch ass shit. If you're sure you want to be a developer, get to work son, and zone out on your computer. That's the appropriate stance. Stop looking to institutions for answers.
RogerL 13y ago
"I think they are both valid approaches." For limited ranges of valid. If you are implementing a low performance requirement CRUD app, certainly you can become an effective programmer without knowing the low level details. But if you want to be an engineer? Good luck. I've worked with people that didn't know the stuff behind C, and they are pretty useless as soon as performance matters, or you need to talk to hardware, or crank through a lot of numerical computations, minimize watt usage of a cellphone, app, debug complicated situations, and so on. They don't have a good mental model of the machine in their mind, and so they cannot figure out what is going on, reason about the performance of a modern chip, and so on. There are a lot of arguments for expediency on HN. Probably it is partially justified, but I will always advocate for an engineering education, as opposed to a 'learn rails in 3 weeks and get a job' approach. Education and knowledge enables you to tackle any problem that comes your way. So, while you can learn to be an effective debugger of a Python script (say) and so on without detailed knowledge of the machine, mastering the fundamentals will make you an effective debugger and enable you to do so much more. To stick with the python, what happens if the python implementation is buggy? There is a large subset of programmers that can not cope with that situation. Why limit yourself? If this is going to be your career, the way you pay your mortgage, feed your kids, and so on, invest in yourself. I'm having trouble of thinking of the downside of acquiring the knowledge, but I can trivially think of the upside.
- actsasbuffoon 13y ago
  There are advantages to the other side. Many fascinating developments were made possible by those who prefer to think functionally, as opposed to imperatively. Modern relational database engines are fairly easy to implement once you understand set theory. Lambda calculus has taught me how to create a linked list using nothing but partially applied higher order functions. Software transactional memory was invented in Haskell, and it's easy to see why it happened there first. The world needs people who think mechanically as well as people who think at a very high level of abstraction. I'm glad people like you exist, as tech would be vastly behind where it is now otherwise. I'm also glad there are people like me. We may not always see problems the same way, but the world is a better place because of our differences.
3rd3 13y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw#t=50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw#t=50 Or typo?

mgmeyers 13y ago

Does any one know of any good self study resources (or online courses) on this subject?

dobbsbob 13y ago
The C Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie (Kernighan has 2 other good programming books too) and/or look around youtube for tutorials on C. MIT has this online, lecture notes were good enough for me plus K&R book http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-087-practical-programming-in-c-january-iap-2010/lecture-notes/ http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput... This is a good course about architecture http://www.nand2tetris.org/course.php http://www.nand2tetris.org/course.php
- dmunoz 13y ago
  > look around youtube for tutorials on C This is likely to be horrible advice. I don't doubt that there are good C tutorials on youtube, but there are probably also hundreds of extremely poor tutorials that are seductive and even highly rated because the people rating don't know better. K&R C is excellent. I don't like overbearing advice, but "Every serious programmer should read K&R C" isn't bad as far as such advice goes. I don't particularly like the "Learn X The Hard Way" series (maybe it is the right way, but I find it too painful), but there is Learn C The Hard Way [0]. [0] http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/ http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/
omnibrain 13y ago
I currently follow this course: http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/ http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/ I'm at exercise 19 and enjoy it so far. I think I already learned a lot. It may not suite everybody and I don't even know if it's good, though.
stefantalpalaru 13y ago
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/562303/the-definitive-c-book-guide-and-list http://stackoverflow.com/questions/562303/the-definitive-c-b...

UNIXgod 13y ago

Lean C when you need to grok how memory works in computing. Learn Scheme to grok the science of computing. Learn BSD when you want to understand operating systems and the network stack. Grok engineering when you write a scheme->c translator running on BSD.

banachtarski 13y ago
This feels highly prescriptive.
- anaphor 13y ago
  It's mostly true though, especially about BSD. The BSD TCP/IP stack code is used for teaching about network stack implementations, and Scheme is extremely useful for exploring theoretical ideas.
hobbyist 13y ago
Could you elaborate more or give some references on the second and third part? I am done with the first. I seriously need some profound knowledge on second and third, which a lot of people like you talk about. I need to put a plan to get there too. Scheme to C looks fun though :-) . Where should I start first with?
- gamegoblin 13y ago
  If you want to implement Scheme in C, I'd take a look at Scheme From Scratch (http://michaux.ca/articles/scheme-from-scratch-bootstrap-v0_1-integers http://michaux.ca/articles/scheme-from-scratch-bootstrap-v0_...) It's pretty excellent for learning how to implement a simple language in C.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  Do yourself a service and write the Scheme compiler in Scheme itself, doing direct assembly code generation. http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf Also a nice way to learn about bootstraping compilers. Generating code code for another OS without Scheme support is just a matter of having your compiler cross-compile to the other OS. Then use the fresh backed compiler to re-compile your compiler in the new OS.

anaphor 13y ago

"The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large." -- Don Knuth

betterunix 13y ago

Personally I take a different view: learn a high-level language, use it to study computer science, and if you feel like writing some low-level code go ahead and learn C (though even then, you could probably do better by bootstrapping a compiler for your favorite high-level language and adding some extensions for low-level operations). C is not the best or even a particularly good language to try to learn abstract CS concepts with, professors who choose it are needlessly stressing out their students, and at the end of the day you can learn a lot more about algorithms and data structures when you are not busy worrying about pointers or trying to avoid the things that "everyone knows to avoid" (except people keep failing to do so). I say this as someone who watched the catastrophic results of trying to use C++ as a language to teach data structures. It is far more important to be able to think abstractly than to know how to deal with pointers.

banachtarski 13y ago
The thing that makes C a good candidate is that it's a very very small language. Yes there are plenty of strange quirks that the experts need to deal with but you can come up with an elegant and compact implementation of every standard data structure. High level languages tend to favor one data structure over another. Starting with those languages can give students the "hammer syndrome" w.r.t. that structure.
- anaphor 13y ago
  I see this a lot with functional programmers and linked lists. Yeah you can derive a lot of data structures from a list, but sometimes it's like putting a square peg into a round hole, and a custom data structure would be more efficient.
  - nbouscal 13y ago
    As far as I can tell, only hobbyist functional programmers try to make everything work with linked lists. Most people who write in functional languages professionally know to use the correct data structure for the job, and how to do so (the most common educational resource being Okasaki's Purely Functional Data Structures).

yoha 13y ago

It really depends on what you're aiming for. - pure mathematical stuff, graphs and such, you can skip programming - making algorithms/protocols/etc by simple models require to understand what a computer can do, etc so learn at least Python - making new architectures, efficient functions (like for crypto), go to C. I am suggesting Python, because it is probably the simplest programming language to learn. I'm not saying that learning Python when you do purely theoretical stuff is useless, just that you can skip it and still work. Event if you do no CS-related things, programming is useful. tl;dr: go for Python, unless you need to now the specific workings of a computer

betterunix 13y ago
"I am suggesting Python, because it is probably the simplest programming language to learn." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_%28programming_language%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_%28programming_language... (Otherwise I agree, start with something like this to learn CS)

pjmlp 13y ago

Please don't! Learn Delphi/Object Pascal, Ada, Modula-2, Rust and discover control over memory managerment doesn't require throwing safety out of the window. Performance can be fine-tuned to the 1% hotspots that really require playing dirty tricks. That there are modular systems programming languages with compile times times that leave C to shame. Then cry as you are forced to adopt C to be understood by the rest of the world.

kabdib 13y ago
The problem being, if you show up and all you know is Delphi / Pascal / Ada, you're going to be unemployable. [I'm a veteran of a ton of Object Pascal, btw. Done some Delphi, too -- it was nice. But.] In general, pushing a niche language as The One does not do a beginner a service. Delphi has never been more than a niche. We had a guy at Apple decide to do his project in Oberon. Super smart guy who pretty good work. He wound up getting fired because it wasn't a smart choice for the people around him who had to take over the code. I don't know why some people over-index on programming language. You use what's appropriate. If you're working alone, do whatever floats your boat. If you're on a team, using the Latest Shiny Thing or The Most Correct Safest Thing may not be the best choice. If you're a student, using your professor's favorite language (we used to call these little pet horrors PL/Prof or PROF-TRAN) outside of the course is probably a bad choice -- you want to learn what the market is, and you need to know what the weak points of your chosen language are. It's particularly poignant to see "Java only" kids come out of school who are utterly ignorant of memory models, barely know what XOR is, and who can only express themselves in terms of classes and interfaces. There's more to life than that.
- Avshalom 13y ago
  The problem is that unless enough people make a conscious decision otherwise the 30-40 years of C libraries/collected-knowledge means it's always "what's appropriate" even in cases where no: fortran, ada, pascal... forth/lisp/whatever-you-have-that-can-talk-to-metal would actually be more (or as) appropriate.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  > The problem being, if you show up and all you know is Delphi / Pascal / Ada, you're going to be unemployable. Sure, it is all about learning for the job I guess. My rant goes into another direction actually. Young kinds nowadays tend to think that not only C is the only player on its field, it never existed nothing else before it. Whereas many of us, remember the days when C was just another systems programming languages among many others to choose from. So if they learn only C, then they get into this mentalit that bounds checkings, modules, proper vectors belongs to the realm of VM languages, while only C allow for full control. If on the other hand they learn about the Algol family of systems programming languages, besides C, they will be aware of other languages that offer the same feature set of C, compile to native code as well, while offering higher productivity. Having that knowledge will make them better C programmers as well, as they might learn a better sense of safety and disciple while coding C.

fantnn 13y ago

>I'm an undergraduate studying computer science andddd that's as far as I made it

michaelochurch 13y ago

Learn C and learn computer science. Let's get away from subjective "shoulds" and talk about practical stuff. You want to learn things, as much as possible, that (a) are likely to remain useful in 15 years and (b) are going to qualify you for the highest quality of jobs. C, as a language, passes this test. So do the fundamentals of computer science; they may not bring you quantity in job opportunities, but they'll give you access to quality. Aside from that? Well, it's hard to predict the future. I can't make individual calls. Who would have thought JavaScript would be so popular in 2014? The whole language is a hack. But if you learned it in 2000, you still have a high-demand skill set. Learning one thing or one small set of things won't do, though. You need to future-proof yourself with a wider knowledge portfolio, and very few jobs will teach a person to do that. On the other hand, if you learn a lot of useless and parochial crap that won't generalize (i.e. the quirks of your own corporate codebase) you get to a semi-depressed state of "learnout" (you struggle to assimilate new things, because you've filled your brain with unrewarding crap) and that's no good either.

dclara 13y ago
"The whole language is a hack." Interesting enough that it is a must for the web development although it's lacking the structure definition from CS point of view. How about other scripting languages, such as Python or Ruby?
- ForHackernews 13y ago
  Python is growing in importance in scientific computing, displacing languages like R, MATLAB, and Fortran (yes, Fortran). There's a pretty good chance it will still be in wide use in science in 10-15 years. Ruby is harder to predict. It seems like a lot of the web developers who would have used Rails a few years ago are now opting for server-side javascript, based in node.js.
  - dclara 13y ago
    Thank you. But do you mean Julia to replace R, Matlab and Fortran?

gpcz 13y ago

Joel Spolsky wrote a good article about this called "Back to Basics" (src: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html ). My favorite quote from it (capitalization modified) is, "If you want to teach somebody something well, you have to start at the very lowest level. It's like Karate Kid. Wax on, wax off. Wax on, wax off. Do that for three weeks. Then knocking the other kid's head off is easy."

NAFV_P 13y ago

> This semester I used function pointers in an assignment and later heard them described as “Quinn’s magic C voodoo”. I still think I have to polish up on 'em: #include <stdio.h> #include <ctype.h> // int chk_arg(char *s, int (*f)(int)) { while(*s) if(!(f(*s))) return 1; else ++s; return 0; } // char *s[]= { "1048leet576", "numbers only pls\n" }; if(chk_arg(*s, isdigit)) printf(*(s+1)); > This was confusing - my classmates were juniors and seniors who were 3+ years into a computer science degree, yet many of them didn’t seem to have an understanding of how computers worked. They could write high-level code and analyze algorithms, but had never used malloc. What the hell, CS students who haven't used malloc? I've got no formal background in CS, yesterday I wrote a binary search tree in C that passed valgrind.

moccajoghurt 13y ago
I am positive that 95% of the CS students with a BSc. degree in my college haven't even seen function pointers. We learn the basics of C then OOP in C++ and the rest of the study will be Java. It's a farce and as an employer I wouldn't even care whether my employee has a fancy degree. You won't find real coders if you choose them by their degree. At least in Germany it's like that. I am not sure of it's different in other countries.
- NAFV_P 13y ago
  > At least in Germany it's like that. I am not sure of it's different in other countries. I get the impression it is the same situation in the UK. It's nice knowing I can do a dozen rounds with a CS graduate.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  I am a Portuguese living in Germany and every time someone describes me how CS degrees work here, I always feel sorry for my work colleagues. When I took my degree in Portugal in the mid-90's, it was a 5 year long degree, with heavy mix of theory and practical subjects in lots of programming languages. I got to use C, C++, Prolog, Camllight, Java, PL/I, Algol, Pascal as compulsory ones. Plus many many others that I got to learn/use as part of the compiler design lectures I used to attend to. All CS areas had introductory levels as compulsory, with the more advanced ones as optional subjects. Given the way the credits were set up, quite a few of those advanced ones were also required.

Kapura 13y ago

This article resonated deeply with my own experience. Like Rohlf, I learned to program TI-Basic in middle school, and like him, I've had the ability to see several different teaching paradigms when it comes to computer science. In the high school computer science courses I was able to take, the programs were relatively simple with an, in my opinion, too-overt emphasis on object oriented programming. It was in java, and very little of the class focused on the "how" aspect of the language. My first CS courses at university were in Ada. I don't know how many of y'all have programmed in Ada, but I think about it like a wordier C that doesn't let you just get away with shit because it's strongly typed. This was the language we were taught basic control structures in and, to be fair, the way we were taught focused on good styling so that our code would be unreadable mush. The UNIX class was in C, and it is, in my opinion, the most rigorous course that most of the students will take on their way to the bachelor's degree. The students build, across a series of projects, a shell that can execute commands and run simple scripts. The sorts of problems encountered introduce the students to the nature of C at a very low level, as well as the sorts of structures that can be used to solve practical problems. Many of the high level more theoretical classes are language-agnostic, and many of the students use either Python or C#. I think that it's good that these higher-level theoretical classes allow us to choose our own language, because I think that the ways in which different programmers attack the same problem might bias them towards one or another language. Recently, the lower-level classes had their programming language changed. Heeding the argument that Ada wasn't super relevant in the higher-level classes, the faculty changed the language to Python. This was, I think, a mistake. My opinion is that the lower level classes should be taught in C for many of the same reasons Rohlf mentioned. I think it's important that the students have an idea of how their data is being represented on the disk so that they could better understand the costs associated with certain tasks. The best argument that I heard for Python was that not everybody taking these into classes go on to write the sort of code that requires something fast or efficient. Python makes data processing easy, which is really the most important thing that students should learn in intro-to-programming classes. I'd say this is a fair point.

GuiA 13y ago
I have a similar experience, and agree with your sentiment. I taught myself TI-Basic in the 7th grade. Then when I was really fluent in it and started hitting its limits around the 9th grade (I was mostly interesting in writing real time games), I picked up z80 assembly. Later (10th grade) I wanted to write programs on my computer, I installed Linux and learned C (not that they're related, but the hacker world really intrigued me. It also means that I spent my first "real" programming years as a member of the broad Linux community; I even submitted patches to large FOSS projects like Gnome, which still shapes me as an engineer to this day). Then in university we used Ada for algorithms/application programming the first semester (partly because I'm French, and French professors love the fact that Ada is French; and partly for the reasons parent poster mentioned), before transitioning to C (at first for Unix programming, and then more general programming), and finally doing C++/Java in our final year (we also had a few domain specific classes where we used a different language: SQL for databases, assembly for electrical engineering, PHP for webdev, etc.). I really like the progression I followed, as I feel like it was logically consistent, exposed me to a lot of different aspects of computer science, and forged me into a fairly solid programmer. I've tutored students whose first language was Java, and their mental model of programming/computer science was a big mess. The best of them figured things out a year or so in, but a lot of them remained confused throughout their college years. Now I volunteer with a program that teaches kids how to program, and we use Ruby. I think Ruby/Python are great for giving beginners a taste of programming; and it's enough for the kids who don't fall in love with it. But with the kids for whom programming just clicks and is clearly going to be their field of predilection as a teenarger/college student, I'm starting to believe that C (ideally on an Unix system) is the way to go.

habosa 13y ago

I think C is a great language to teach someone why all of the CS theory matters. When you write Java, almost everything you do will "work" and it will probably run pretty fast on your Core i7. When you write C you have to be much more deliberate. There's no massive standard library to do arr.sort() for you and you have to really think about how to implement some basic processes that you took for granted. I think C made me a much better Java programnmer because I now understand what the most minimal way to complete a task can be. No more HashMap<String, ArrayList<Object>> once you've played with structs and C arrays.

tbirdz 13y ago
"There's no massive standard library to do arr.sort() for you and you have to really think about how to implement some basic processes that you took for granted" Not massive by any means, but the C standard library does include qsort() (quicksort) in stdlib.h

blahbl4hblahtoo 13y ago

Lots of people confuse learning to code in C with learning how hardware works. Its close in some ways but not all. EDIT: WOW. I'm amazed at how many people think that C is "how memory works". Just wow. This is one of those things where you're confusing the map for the territory and ascribing value to something because its "hard". C is a fairly high level abstraction for interacting with a computer...i know that everyone has heard that c is close to being assembler...but what you are forgetting is that assembler is also an abstraction over operands. The reason i think its important to point this out is that malloc and free arent magical. Othér techniques are just as valid and the notion of "low level" is misleading. C makes tradeoffs that actually give rise to all of the vulnerabilities and stability problems in all the software that you have ever used. Those tradeoffs are REAL and just because lots of you get this macho nonsense about not using safe collection types everyone on the planet has to deal with malware. So many of you buy your own bullshit at an astonishing level...its really breathtaking to see how many of you cant see the built in assumptions in what you are saying.

deleted 13y ago
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ufo 13y ago
At this point, the only thing that still keeps C close to the hardware is that they need to keep the hardware close to C model because of all the legacy code in the world. Most recent hardware innovations, like pipelining, speculative code execution, SIMD, etc are not easily expressed in C. Additionally, C was written in a time where accessing the memory was cheap and had a uniform cost - nowadays memory access times vary immensely depending on if its cached or not.
- blahbl4hblahtoo 13y ago
  right on my knowledgeable homie...
smorrow 13y ago
To elaborate on this... malloc and free aren't even a part of C itself. Other than static (globals and "static" the keyword) and automatic (stack) allocation there isn't any memory management in C itself. malloc and free are library functions wrapping system calls. That's something to do with the operating system - the machine itself has NOTHING like malloc and free. I and many people know C but know fuck all about assembly programming. (for now)

gwu78 13y ago

To truly appreciate C I think having to program in assembly first helps. I say learn assembly first, then learn C. Then do whatever you want.

moccajoghurt 13y ago
On the other hand... give a student python in the first semester and he'll get hooked. In the second semester you can start the approach you proposed.

garrettdreyfus 13y ago

I learned to program in python, and later in front end web development languages such as js, css, and html. I have recently started to learn about operating systems, with the eventual goal to contribute to the Linux kernel. Before now I had never touched C. I ran into very similar problems. My first C program forked a child, its child initiated a shared memory object, wrote a collatz sequence to it and exited. Then the parent read and printed from the memory object. It took over 2 hours because C was so alien to me.

was_hellbanned 13y ago

I think we need to break all of this down into at least three entirely separate areas: 1) Computer Science, which is, in my opinion, entirely a subset of mathematics, and should be taught as such. 2) Coding, which is the ability to break a problem down and describe it in a series of simple steps. 3) Craft and application, which is everything about how to use tools, best practices for code architecture, and everything else that every new graduate is usually terrible at. I think we could satisfy most of the world's need for "programmers" by teaching #2 and #3 in a trade school model.

marcosdumay 13y ago
The problem here appears when you want to teach #1. You shouldn't do it without also teaching #2 and #3 (isn't that obvious enough?), but #3 is often out, and it seems that there are some people trying to not "lose time" with #2 either.
- was_hellbanned 13y ago
  I would say someone on a full CS-and-engineering track should study #2 (intro), #1 (rigorous CS/math), and finish with #3, since that's where you want to focus on the latest industry standards and trends. This is similar to my own CS university experience, but I'd like to see it broken out into much better defined areas, with different ratios of focus for different career tracks. I also think a full program should take significantly longer than a 4-year degree. Incidentally, I think #1 could easily be taught without #3 at all. I get the impression that there are quite a few academic people who tinker with interesting algorithmic work, in esoteric languages, who couldn't effectively write maintainable code for mass deployment. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just a different area of specialization.

knappador 13y ago

My recipe for the best possible syllabus for CS 103: * Turing machine -- just the tape and making it do the equivalent of procedures so that we can compose things. Brainfuck is a valid homework medium. * A relevant ISA such as ARM -- We can let Thumb/2 be bonus points, but the real goal is just to convey that ISA's are usually written to take the most generally abstractable things you would do with a Turing machine and do it more succinctly and faster in hardware. * Build a function stack with the goal of understanding how procedures become generalized by calling conventions or optimized by inlining. The lesson is that we stay pure for flexibility and get dirty for raw speed. * Introduce Scheme and tail recursion optimization. Now the whole of functional programming and the abstractions -- and their optimizations -- are opened up with a firm footing in the machine. Turing and Church probably did write most of CS, so it's obvious that you want to relate the two to create the most generally useful bridge concepts for the rest of the long life of a programmer, that if they never let up, will inevitably touch both high-level and low-level languages. OS's are the final frontier here, but cannot possibly be squeezed down due to things like MMU functionality totally clouding up what is what. Making a machine look like it belongs to the program is what OS's are good at, and this is a different kind of abstraction to grok than the relationship between the machine and the programmer.

bmoresbest55 13y ago

I am a recent graduate of CS and completed a year of C after my first year in Java. Then finished the final two years in something of interest and software development courses. I had the ability to do this at a single school and feel I got a full education in terms of covering a large area of study and understanding coding as well as the science behind it. I do however still feel overwhelmed at times and am constantly learning. Lynda for language basics because languages are cool and Two Scoops because Python and Django are awesome.

dljsjr 13y ago

I'm not convinced that these things need to be mutually exclusive. In the CS department at my university, the only language used for the first 3 years is C. But all of the courses are split in to a "lecture" and "lab" component. In lecture you learn about Computer Science; you learn data structures, algorithms, computational complexity, graph theory, proofs, summations, stats, combinatorics, etc. In lab you learn Programming; you implement a lot of these algorithms and data structures in C. Abstract vs. Concrete Data Types are introduced very early as representations for the theoretical structures discussed in class and then we are given projects that can be solved using concepts and theorems introduced with the expectation that we will implement the appropriate structures and algorithms in C. The code itself is read over carefully and just as important as whether the output is good. Now, this is partially a luxury afforded by my university's small size; freshman and sophomore CS classes aren't taught in 200 person lecture halls, they're 30-40 students at the max. My first exposure to a linked list was writing one in C, not using one in Lisp. You model them, write proofs, recurrence relations, graphs, etc. on exams, and implement them in projects so that you show an aptitude for both the theory and the mechanics. By the time you hit your fourth year, you take Programming Languages and Theory of Computation. Automata/Machines, Grammars, BNF, Compilers, etc. in lecture; seeing these concepts applied by studying and writing code in OO languages, LISPs, and Prologs in lab. And you'd sure as hell better understand how the garbage collector in your favorite high level language works or you'll get hosed on the exam. There's other staples mixed in of course; a whole semester devoted to Java/OO (I think a whole semester devoted to functional programming and Lisp would be better, but that's another story). A semester of OS, a semester of Networking. But just focusing on the whole programming/vs science side of it, there's no reason they can't both be taught effectively.

YZF 13y ago
And how did that work? I'm just trying to imagine those first year students staring at those segmentation faults or trying to decipher some other non-intuitive C behaviour (promotion rules, = vs. ==, pointer arithmetics, various implicit rules). Talk about being thrown into the deep end of the pool to swim... When a language like Pascal is taught as a first language students can focus on the mechanics of their algorithms rather than struggling with language oddities and machine architecture. I think that's important for new programmers to be able to focus on the flow and mechanics without worrying about other details. Once you get that you can "advance" to things that leak more of the underlying architecture into your program. There are probably many other languages that fit that bill. EDIT (replying to jkrems): E.g. in C if(a=1) assigns 1 to a. I think some modern compilers at least warn on this but they didn't use to and it's perfectly legal. You can't do this in Pascal. You can still make a mistake but you'll get a compiler error. This is a very common mistake for beginners...

YZF 13y ago

I would argue C is a difficult first language. It's even a difficult 2nd or 3rd language. I would start people off programming at a higher level of abstraction and once they can do that dive into how things work. You could start the other way but it may be too theoretical and discouraging. Pascal used to be the language of choice and IMO can still work well. Things got more complicated when we got all those competing paradigms and now you have a matrix of language/paradigm. Should you teach OO? Functional? Procedural? I also think it's important to lay our some theoretical foundations as you're teaching the first language. You don't want to overdo it but you need to start building some basic ideas, notations, concepts. As long as it doesn't get in people's way in their ability to actually build something... If you want to understand how computers work there's no substitute for programming in assembler, preferably, under different hardware architectures. This debate about how to teach programming/CS/software engineering is endless. Different people and different schools have different goals and different capabilities. A well rounded software engineer definitely needs to have a good mix of theory and practice. A CS researcher needs a different perhaps mix.

vinceguidry 13y ago
C is an excellent 2nd language. The language itself is obtuse, but the underlying model is fairly simple. C++ is a horrible one. These days, probably nobody should learn C++ and should probably pick up Go instead. As a teenager, I picked up a book on C++ having already learned BASIC, Pascal, and MS-DOS but never got proficient in it. I should have picked C. The "++" lead me to believe that it was a better language than C and I didn't have any real programmers around to tell me otherwise. Oh the missed opportunities...
- YZF 13y ago
  C++ has many followers but it's a multi-headed beast and some of it can be much harder to grasp. I think it's easier to argue that it's better than C; all you need to do is to look at C code that tries to implement some patterns that are more naturally expressed in C++. Go isn't really a substitute for C++ but one might argue D is. Sounds like C++ and you didn't quite work out. I'd still encourage trying to figure out how some pieces of C++ can improve your C code and use those. You're welcome to stick to C in the rest of your code. A lot of "real programmers" do use C++ successfully and a lot of software you use has C++ in it's DNA... EDIT: (That said I would only expose new students to C++ after they've seen C and some higher level language so they can appreciate the niche that it fills)

rismay 13y ago

Good stuff. However, I don't think that "learning to code," ins being used in the same sense that Terence Eden meant. I think what Quinn Rohlf is trying to say is, "Learn how computers work." And what Eden is trying to say is, "Learn how to be logical." And for a hat trick of HNs submissions, what Andrew Wulf is trying to say over at thecodist.com is that in general you should just, "Learn how to keep learning." Taken as a sum of collective knowledge, I think everyone is right in this case. I think the general idea people are trying to get at is this: 1. To work in technology, you must love learning. (Don't get steamrolled). 2. To work in technology, you should know how computers really work. (Learn about C.) 3. Working in technology is not about learning where to but the curly brackets. It's about learning how to think logically. (Learn Computer Science.) In this sense, I think a great way to get started is by working on a project that you love and in a medium you love. Then as you start hitting limits, descend to C and learn algorithms.

dylandrop 13y ago

In my time as a CS student, I've never needed to use C nor understand its syntax to get through my classes. I think you're confusing the necessity of learning C with understanding how a computer works, and the two are not the same. I think the most useful class I took that explained this (in my sophomore year) was a class on digital logic and micro-architecture. Just about every school I know teaches some class like this early on in your education (at least teaching the basics -- gates, latches, flip-flops, adders, etc.) In mine, it even carried up through some basic assembly code. This class gave me enough to know how computers are working at a fundamental level to be able to use that to my advantage when implementing projects. Lastly -- you're getting a CS degree, not a programming degree from a vocational school. Does everyone who researches... quantum computing, or natural language processing, or graph theory have to know and communicate in C? I think there are other pursuits beyond programming that you get from a CS degree, and to say it's necessary to learn C pivots your school closer to a vocational school. Not that that's bad -- it's just different than what you signed up for.

mathattack 13y ago

From personal experience, I learned theory and structure first. It took a long time to "get" variables as locations in memory, and I had to relearn it many times. Harvard (who sends a lot of people on to PhDs) forces everyone to learn C in introductory cs50. I like how they do it. If you don't get "the machine" early it is hard to get it later.

austinz 13y ago

I come from an EE background, so I learned C and studied various aspects of computer hardware and computer architecture to some relative level of detail before doing any sort of algorithms or software design. Sometimes I wonder what sort of software engineer I'd be if I had gone the other way - studied CS to start off and then descended down the stack later on. Would I be better? Worse? How would I think about problems, and what mental models would I go for first?

erichocean 13y ago
I've wondered the same, but in the reverse direction: by the time I started programming, I had read—not kidding—thousands of papers on computer science, and read hundreds of books. I just had no interest in coding. (Or math for that matter, though ironically, I also read math books.) Anyway, I've always wondered if I'm a better or worse CTO for having taken that route. I do know I code much less than my peers, even though (it seems to me) I get much better results with far less coding effort.
- erichocean 13y ago
  I'm not sure why, but this comment stuck with me and I kept thinking about it. Here's an example of where I think learning CS, then programming, helped. I had written my own JavaScript application framework, called Blossom[0], and I wanted "real physics". I took a look at the various 2D physics ports that had been made to JavaScript, and they all had pretty bad performance. Also, I knew from my work as a filmmaker that "real physics" is actually a pain in the ass, because what you actually want is directable physics that feel real. (Stick with me, I'm getting there...) So, I took a step back and determined that what I wanted was to be able to use tween curves like normal, but have the actual path that was taken depend on the velocity and/or acceleration of the movement when the user released their finger, yet be "directed" according to the tween curve. That required doing math, specifically, getting first and second derivatives from your tween curves. Yuck. Except, CS to the rescue, there are these things called Dual numbers[1], and when you use them, you get automatic differentiation[2] for free, without having to rewrite your code. So I wrote a Dual number implementation for JavaScript, grabbed a JS parser and rewrote the tween functions at load time (i.e. with code, automatically) to use the Dual numbers so that I could extract the velocity and acceleration. I then took the original curve based on the user's movement, blended it with the tween derivatives, and the resulting animations were actually really great. The whole thing was efficient enough to get real time performance on an iPad 3 in mobile Safari, entirely in JavaScript. And the total time from start of work to the physics-based Dual-number tween animations in Blossom? Two days, and about 2K LOC. If I hadn't know about Dual numbers, there's no way I'd have gotten there just by sitting down and programming, and who knows how long it took the FB team to do the dynamics for FB Home, or the Apple team to add UI Dynamics to iOS 7. My guess is that it took longer than two days... [0] https://github.com/erichocean/blossom https://github.com/erichocean/blossom [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_number [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_differentiation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_differentiation

icedchai 13y ago

I'm biased, since I taught myself C when I was a teenager. My first language was BASIC (first on the Apple II, then the Amiga.) When I got to high school, they were teaching Pascal on old 8086's. It felt like such a step backwards. This was back in the early 90's. When I go to college, I was able to opt out of the first couple of intro CS classes (and get credit for them) by taking a test or two.

madmax96 13y ago

Terence Eden was saying the same thing that this post said, which is why I was confused at the contradictory tone in this article. It's vital to a good computer science education to understand pointers at a hardware level, differences between stack and heap variables, etc. It's a tragedy that the students at Lewis and Clark looked at pointers to functions and thought voodoo, but it would also be wrong to only teach them the low level stuff, since there most certainly is enough to fill a college experience with. That being said, the only thing that seems missing at Lewis and Clark was a good introductory course. A good background on what languages are doing behind the scenes, as provided by something like C, is a part of computer science and is necessary for a thorough understanding of the subject. It just seems like all the issues talked about were computer science issues.

xarien 13y ago

You're essentially advocating for a bottoms up approach as opposed to a top down approach (albeit in a pretty confusing manner). Both work for different people and circumstances. Personally, I think C is a bit high level for a true bottoms up approach which is more inline with a computer engineering education as opposed to a CS program from a liberal arts college. A good approach is one I experienced while attending a tier 1 eng school over a decade ago: using ASM of a simple simulated cpu with a small instruction set(risc or cisc doesn't really matter although imo risc is by far easier to pick up for less experienced individuals).

niio 13y ago

ignore this, using it to "save" article.

frou_dh 13y ago

I find the notion of syscalls as the interface to an OS more intriguing than the world according to C. C as it stands may be ubiquitous, but other languages can conceivably be implemented as peers to it (rather than on top of it - it took me far too long to realise that). It's fundamental neither on bare metal nor in the presence of an OS.

pjmlp 13y ago
Yep, when C was mainly a UNIX only language, there were another ones to choose from. With UNIXs spread into the enterprise, C started to gain weight. If UNIX hadn't been successful, it would just be yet another language.

maaarghk 13y ago

Hey, it sounds like if you write a book, I'll buy it ;P