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I'd say C is actually a pretty good choice for an educational project like this. Having to write out all of your data structures by hand and manage your memory manually is a good learning experience, and since you're not writing serious production code, you don't have to worry too much about making mistakes.
_someone_ has to learn to build runtimes
Since you're going into your freshman year I'll offer my college advice as a current senior. The moment that you feel a class will be covering something you already know, reach out to your advisor and the professor. I personally wasted far too much time in intro classes that could've been easily bypassed. While easy A's are great for the GPA, it's better to spend your time and money actually learning.
This is seriously impressive. I’m also just about to enter college for software engineering and projects like this make me concerned about how I’m even gonna compete with such skilled peers.
This is seriously impressive. I’m also just about to enter college for software engineering and projects like this make me concerned about how I’m even gonna compete with such skilled peers.
Hasn’t hurt me from finding interesting jobs that pay well!
Nicely done. You're a freshman, picked up C over the summer, and have already built an interpreter for a language that you haven't officially been taught yet, and have a blog with a couple dozen posts. I'll be honest, people with achievements like yours make me feel pretty worthless.
Ya, but would you rather spend the summer enjoying summer or writing C
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C is like a high level assembly language. It maps very closely to how the computer actually runs programs. That, and it’s simplicity, make it a great way to learn. It’s not usually a great idea for production code anymore, but for learning it’s fantastic.
That old chestnut. C is nothing remotely like an assembly language, of any kind. It is a low-level programming language, but only compared to most languages. Disassemble some compiled C code sometime -- it's another world entirely.
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> several better options these days
Every other option requires you to buy into some additional paradigm-of-the-day.
You can easily lose decades going down the wrong programming rabbit holes.