81–90 of 93 posts
You should learn some more fundamental aspects of programming:
1. What's the stack, what's the heap, why do I get a stack overflow from recursion?
2. In C, what's a pointer, how does it relate to arrays?
3. What's garbage collection, and how does it work?
And that will eventually lead you to the inevitable:
4. Why is Python so slow? (haha - getting ready for the downvotes!)
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You got me curious there. Do you have any resource recommendation to learn about the cost of different data structures/algos and such?
This is what big O (also little O and little omega) notation is all about. Unfortunately, all the resources I know of teach it as pure mathematics, so they require a firm grasp of mathematical proofs to understand the details and implications. With that said I highly recommend the classic Introduction to Algorithms (CLRS for short) by Cormen et Al. It is written in clear and straightforward language. And the lectures…
at my first programming job (now almost 30 years ago), I remember implementing the red-black tree algorithms in C from that book. It is chock full of really useful ideas that will make your systems better.
If you're a (reasonably proficient) C programmer, is learning to use Python worth the effort? Or is it just redundant education?
I can see that learning Python is probably worth it for a new programmer, but is it worth it for a proficient C programmer?
[Let the flame wars begin!]
No need to learn C to better understand Python. Almost any gain you would make could be had by reading or watching an overview of the internals.
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I think many programmers forget how it was to learn to program. Imagine the horror trying to make Rusts borrow checker happy without even understanding what an object scope or pointer is. C is a really good beginner's language, since any oop is explicit with function calls, kinda like Basic. No invisible destructors etc. Modern compilers even warns you on returning pointers to stack locals etc. I don't think Python i…
Good points. Though it would be a good debate that Go would be a better beginner language. Java's forcing of class based OOP would cause an avalanche of other kinds of problems that Go and C don't have to deal with.
Also, it is probably better to get started with the much more common nominal typing over structural.
Which of these 3 aspects do you feel C would help you understand better?
Maybe you are asking this question because you want to understand programming languages and how they work in which case a course in compilers and programming languages from a MOOC would help.
I think every coder who have the time to do so should learn C. Preferably before anything else. Maybe I'm biased by my education, since I started with almost a year of hardcore C(almost no libs, coding everything from scratch), I did code a bit before but nothing serious. After 1 year of segfaults, memory leaks, and random buffer overflows, everything else seems pretty easy, and everything make much more sense. You w…
It seems liking the C language is frowned upon in this site.
Let me ask that same question from the other direction: If you're a (reasonably proficient) C programmer, is learning to use Python worth the effort? Or is it just redundant education? I can see that learning Python is probably worth it for a new programmer, but is it worth it for a proficient C programmer? [Let the flame wars begin!]
E.g., Jax "just works" for a wide variety of numerical problems, handles the automatic differentiation and operator fusion and whatnot and figures out how to efficiently shove it onto whichever coprocessor(s) I want to target.