121–130 of 208 posts
I've been programming in C for longer than my current manager has been alive. :-)
Ok kadbid, I am intrigued. what's the story? Why didn't you make the transition to other languages? Why didn't you make the transition into management? I'm not questioning your decisions, just curious.
As a first reaction I thought, well, more than 50% of HNers fluent with C, the average age should be pretty high probably. But then I realized that actually the average HN age is probably around 25 (from other pools I saw here), so I guess, there are still a lot of fresh programmers learning C. I really hope so. I love higher level programming languages and spent a lot of time with Tcl, Scheme, FORTH, Joy, Ruby, and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok kadbid, I am intrigued. what's the story? Why didn't you make the transition to other languages? Why didn't you make the transition into management? I'm not questioning your decisions, just curious.
The " transition into management" is one of my biggest career related fears. Let me code please :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't know C. Coding in C and C++ has diverged significantly enough that they are two completely different languages. That said, answer #3 or #4 makes sense.
I said I would consider it a burden to write in pure C, not that I would not be able to do it. I would not need any documentation, but I would scratch my head figuring out how to organize a large program. I would need to write a lot of comments to replace things that do not exist in the language: const-correctness, memory management conventions, type-safe containers, etc.
I've been programming in C for longer than my current manager has been alive. :-)
Ok kadbid, I am intrigued. what's the story? Why didn't you make the transition to other languages? Why didn't you make the transition into management? I'm not questioning your decisions, just curious.
C just happens to be the right choice for most of my projects today (I half seriously proposed FORTH for one before my cow-orkers threatened me with a dunking).
Let's make a distinction between Management as an HR function (writing reviews, dealing with org issues, fighting for equipment and office supplies) and Senior Geek Nirvana (design work, heavy lifting in code and debugging / shipping a product). I tried Management for a while, and it stunk.
Right now I'm in a great position as a senior technical guy (I hesitate to say "Architect" because most of the people I know with that title are self-appointed blowhards) who gets to decide how to do stuff. I lean on managers ("we need some chairs, and an oscilloscope") and project management (for setting up meetings, tracking bugs, etc.), and I get to write a ton of docs and code. It's terrific fun.
I'm living proof that you can be writing in C and not be a sour, dried-up dinosaur in the back corner of a lab somewhere.
1. Buy K&R.
2. Read it. Maybe 2 or 3 times during the process of reading it, I would go write a program to try what I had just learned. This was was around 1980, so trying a program meant walking across campus to a terminal. I could either head to the computing center and use a public terminal, or to the high energy physics building (where I had just started a work-study job programming and it required C). The former would mean competing for a free terminal--and annoying people if I was spending my time at the terminal mostly reading K&R instead of typing. The later meant sitting at a terminal next to a noisy minicomputer in a cold room.
When I got to the end of K&R, I was a C programmer in theory.
3. Start doing real work, using K&R as a reference.
Very quickly theory became aligned with reality, and I was then a C programmer in practice.
Nowadays, most programming books I find assume that I'm sitting eagerly at a computer as I read, and that I want to stop every three paragraphs and type in some code and run it, and then the book discusses what that code did with the author writing under the assumption that I have the output of the code on my screen.
I like the K&R way better.