41–50 of 106 posts
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Just read K&R for 10 minutes.
:-) I wish people would stop recommending this outdated book, along with a few other default goto books (say, the Dragon book). Its super optimistic approach is more about the language K&R wanted C to be than the real thing.
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Introducing newbies to GTK is a great way to show them a lot of code they don't understand, will take a while to understand, and will break in non-obvious ways.
..and that uses non-standard concepts like GObject. Win32 examples would have been peak hilarity. More seriously, I see where the author is coming from, but even historically, GUI code has always been a massive pain in C.
ExAmples
I think this has merit not only for beginners to programming, but also for programmers who have never touched C. I like that it gets straight to business. Good intro, and props to the author for introducing it on three major desktop platforms, using modern build tools.
This is a very strange "getting started" guide to C, and I'm not sure who the intended audience could possibly be. The tone at the start really does seem to be aimed at "absolute beginners" ("[...] programs must be written in a very strict way. Miss a comma and the program will stop working"), but then it quickly gets into the weeds without much explanation. I'm trying to imagine an beginner reading this: The first t…
Wrt "the first line loads the stdio.h function library, which provides the printf() function", you're right, "loading a library" is not clear and, what's worse, is actively misleading as actually we're just telling the compiler that there is a function somewhere called printf that will get "loaded" (linked) later on. I remember that this was one of the things that confused me most about C when I learned it.
absolutely same, me too. and, there was no good websites / videos on the web back then.
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It kind of depends on what you need out of C. The only real reasons left to use C in the wild are: * Legacy code * Embedded (including drivers, bare metal etc.) * Portability, FFI, etc. Performance used to be another major reason, but in $CURRENT_YEAR, if that's your goal, C++ and Rust are just as performant and there's very little reason not to opt into them. The other major reason to learn C is that it's a great "h…
I would still suggest that people learn C before attempting C++; while someone with C# or Java experience could probably do well in a "modern C++" codebase, as soon as they go off-piste into memory allocation and pointers they're in for surprises. (Is there anyone who learns Rust who isn't already a proficient but frustrated C++ programmer?)
That escalated quickly, poor beginners :').
The author assumes the reader doesn't know what a terminal is, and goes from a "hello world" to a cross-platform graphical "hello world" using GTK-3 without explanation.
"Trust me, I don't have time to explain!"
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There should only be one way to succeed. Returning 0 for success makes complete sense. You can add layers of macros or enums to sugar coat this but retuning 0 for the success case makes complete sense
Yes, but if you use "magic constants" in your code, you will flunk code review in any halfway competent shop. Always use the constant symbols.
The article uses nano throughout. Is nano a popularly used editor? I have not seen anyone around using nano. I see vim, atom, sublime, vs code but never nano. Just curious if nano is popular. If nano is popular what are its pros and cons?
If I ssh into a machine to change a config value I prefer it to vim/vi.
I'm not going to write anything using it, but for quick edits it's perfect.