that was exactly my experience as a first-year CS student. i had no prior programming experience and CS 101 started with implementing several programs in C. f

that was exactly my experience as a first-year CS student. i had no prior programming experience and CS 101 started with implementing several programs in C. for help i was told "use valgrind" and that was about it. the CS tutors were constantly busy and the class was so big that i couldn't get one on one help, so i had to just spend hours on my own trying to decipher how to dynamically allocate memory without fucking myself. we ended up having a final involving implementing a trivial program in C in front of a TA. my program wouldn't work, yet after trying and trying i couldn't figure out what was wrong with it, so i resigned myself to failing the class and said "i'm done" with a program that didn't run. i had a single syntax error but the implementation was otherwise correct..the professor took pity on me and passed me. had i failed that class i would've said "fuck this" and left CS forever.