Poll: Do you know C? • Hacker News Board

Re: Poll: Do you know C?

#181

Post by mavelikara » Fri, Apr 08, 2011, 1:37 AM UTC

bartonfink wrote: post #18

antirez wrote: post #7

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…

Well, it seems the old stigma against multi-language systems is fading. Even 5 years ago, it was more or less "the rule" that you chose one language for a project and you had to live with whatever trade-offs that choice left you with. Now, people are more willing to accept that you can write much of your system in a language designed for programmer convenience and only write the bottlenecks in a more performance-orie…

Web applications which rich client-side interfaces might be the reason for the change in thinking. In a web application, you anyway have JavaScript to deal with; and until a few years ago, the server-side code was written in some other language.

Re: Poll: Do you know C?

#182

Post by SwellJoe » Fri, Apr 08, 2011, 3:36 AM UTC

tjr wrote: post #162

SwellJoe wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent more than a decade (from the age of about 10) learning to program from a wide variety of books, about a variety of languages. I'd written software in Basic, Pascal, C, Amiga E, ARexx, and assembly. It wasn't until I read K&R in my mid-20s that it all actually started making sense (especially C, but everything made more sense after K&R). Up to that point, I'd been copy-paste programming, imitating, etc. K&R is…

Amiga E was one of the first programming languages I tried to learn. I had started with Apple BASIC, and happened to get a free Amiga E compiler and booklet on some Amiga magazine. The booklet left a lot to be desired; specifically, it showed how to do output but not input, and as a clueless novice BASIC programmer, I naively assumed that Amiga E could not do input. I did not write much of interest using Amiga E, and…

I started with probably the same booklet from probably the same magazine, but I also found a more complete reference making the rounds on local bulletin boards, so I was able to figure out input, and finally ordered the full language package from the author. Wouter van Oortmerssen is still working on nerdy pursuits, and created some other languages over the years, but none were as popular/successful as Amiga E. I made a small sample playback app with it, but my ambitions were far beyond my abilities.

I think it's primary reason for popularity was that it was so easy to use the Amiga GUI elements and other special features of the Amiga OS and hardware. I always had a hard time making stuff work in C, but could build a UI in no time in E.

Re: Poll: Do you know C?

#183

Post by SageRaven » Fri, Apr 08, 2011, 3:43 AM UTC

Dumb question: Is the 2nd Edition K&R for about $50 on Amazon worth the coin over the 1st Edition I recently picked up at a thrift store for a buck?

(I also picked up Steele's C: A Reference Manual, 4th Ed. for a buck at the same place.)

Re: Poll: Do you know C?

#184

Post by DarrenLyman » Fri, Apr 08, 2011, 4:02 AM UTC

I use C for programming PLC's (programmable logic controllers). I have created testing centers built on C to test used PLC's.

Re: Poll: Do you know C?

#185

Post by chicagobob » Fri, Apr 08, 2011, 4:02 AM UTC

I learned C for the first time in 1986 and still use it all the time as my day to day favorite language is Objective-C (and also I've really started to develop a fondness for Ruby too, that's a neat language).

Re: Poll: Do you know C?

#186

Post by follower » Fri, Apr 08, 2011, 4:31 AM UTC

justanotheratom wrote: post #138

tzs wrote: post #130

I wish more languages had books equivalent to K&R. Here's how I learned C. 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 h…

I program primarily in C and believe I know all there is to know about it. But I have never read K&R. A few weeks back, I started reading it, got bored and gave up. But I keep running into people who swear by K&R. Do you guys think it is worth a read after the fact?

I've never understood the love people seem to have for K&R--especially as a beginner text. In the end I put it down to learning approach differences.

A decade ago I thought the book "C Programming : A Modern Approach" by K.N. King was a good starter text--I don't know if there's a better recommendation that's more recent.

In terms of after the fact reading, if you like the terse style of K&R you might pick up something but if you got bored I suspect that means you don't like the style. I suspect the time might be better spent reading some code instead.

Re: Poll: Do you know C?

#187

Post by jdale27 » Fri, Apr 08, 2011, 4:41 AM UTC

wickedchicken wrote: post #22

derrida wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is interesting, whyy do you say that garbage collection was your downfall?

ELIZA was written in SLIP, not C

SLIP

Rogerian LISP?

Re: Poll: Do you know C?

#188

Post by marcomonteiro » Fri, Apr 08, 2011, 5:11 AM UTC

C was my first real programming language. Loved it. I just don't use it much anymore. Most of what I do is either web (Ruby/Rails, PHP, etc) or mobile (Objective-C).

Re: Poll: Do you know C?

#189

Post by jmspring » Fri, Apr 08, 2011, 5:22 AM UTC

tzs wrote: post #130

I wish more languages had books equivalent to K&R. Here's how I learned C. 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 h…

I've mentioned this in a previous thread awhile back. My father's approach to the question of "can I get some video games?" was to throw K&R at me and let me flounder.

Machines that I had at the time were a Trash80 something or other mostly running basic and an AT&T machine running some for of Unix...oh yeah.

But, I fought my way through K&R, multiple c compilers, assembler, etc. to actually learn something on these machines.

An interesting comment from an earlier discussion mentioned "this code (in C) is much cleaner than any C++ I have seen!". The truth is, if you know C, have a good style and discipline, you pretty much can produce more readable/reusable code than your normal c++ person.

Re: Poll: Do you know C?

#190

Post by marcomonteiro » Fri, Apr 08, 2011, 5:26 AM UTC

antirez wrote: post #7

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…

I'm 29. I started programming C when I was 12 or 13 and I really think that C is probably the best language to learn to program with. In fact I made that recommendation to a friend who recently took his first programming class using Processing and he thought I was crazy. I think it's important to understand memory management, pointers, pointer arithmetic and such.