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Learn C The Hard Way

learncodethehardway.org

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Re: Learn C The Hard Way

#131

Post by anacrolix »

zedshaw wrote: post #105
hp wrote: post #82

Ohloh says I've changed at least half million lines of C code ( https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/rhp/positions/total ) Play me a tiny violin ;-) What kinda bugs me is that whenever people go to teach C, they make out like it _has_ to be a low-level exercise, as if writing in C suddenly means you can't use abstract data types or object-oriented style or name your functions properly or have Unicode support. For example,…

I'm glad you got so much about how my book is written from a few paragraphs in an unfinished manuscript for it.

On that note, I see you are going for real old fundamentals. puts() is in your _first_ example. While learning core library stuff is important for C, I think you should make sure to make absolutely NO reference to anything deprecated or mildly dangerous. After all, your book is for noobs, and we all want C to look good.

Re: Learn C The Hard Way

#133

Post by davnola »

zedshaw wrote: post #108
mkramlich wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the level of self-promotion and/or other-people-promoting-him is the key factor. Not really the supposed productivity. I know many people who get a lot done, both for day jobs, for contract work, as a hobby, as entreprenurial ventures, etc. but 99.9% never hits the front page of HN on a regular basis like Zed's activity seems to. Which doesn't lessen what he does and his skills, but it does pull back the came…

I personally have no idea why this stuff hits this site that often. Take this for instance: It is a half-finished manuscript that I announced in a tweet to people who follow me on twitter and asked for it. Already at the top of this set of comments is a dickhead saying he's such a bad ass 'cause he's changed "half a million lines of C code" and he thinks I'm not writing the book correctly because I'm being too low le…

> I personally have no idea why this stuff hits this site that often.

May I clue you in? You create interesting quality projects like Mongrel, Mongrel2, Tir, and LPTHW. You are also entertaining.

If that's self-promotion, let's have more of it.

Re: Learn C The Hard Way

#134

Post by burgerbrain »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #80
zedshaw wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, actually people are deathly afraid of C thanks to other language inventor's excellent marketing against it. There's a few things that you need to really nail to be good at C, and they're difficult things, but it's not "dangerous" like people keep claiming.

The negative connotations of the word aside, it seems perfectly reasonable to call C dangerous. Without that "danger", you couldn't write an OS kernel, a language runtime, or various other low-level code we need on our systems; on the other hand, when writing higher-level code that doesn't need that level of raw access, it seems useful to remove the possibility of a broad class of mistakes. See also Rusty Russell's r…

"Danger" minus the negative connotations is best pronounced "power".

Re: Learn C The Hard Way

#135

Post by burgerbrain »

wvoq wrote: post #119
rpearl wrote: post #5

Do people really think C is some mysterious, inscrutable language? "To many programmers, this makes C scary and evil." Is this actually true for people? I find C code generally very easy and straightforward to understand; there's not any magic behind the scenes, like there is in any language that's more "high level" than C.

I don't intend to argue so much as to offer a data point: I suspect that most folks on this site learned C or something C-like early on, and have internalized its modus operandi. I have been learning C recently from a background of functional programming, and I find it scary and evil. FWIW, I enjoy programming very much, and have built some non-trivial stuff in several languages. Still, I found C extremely taxing. No…

If you're thinking of arrays as second class citizens, you're thinking of the language incorrectly. Rather you should realize there are no arrays, only pointers to chunks of memory and arithmetic operations.

Re: Learn C The Hard Way

#136

Post by burgerbrain »

staunch wrote: post #124
zedshaw wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally have no idea why this stuff hits this site that often. Take this for instance: It is a half-finished manuscript that I announced in a tweet to people who follow me on twitter and asked for it. Already at the top of this set of comments is a dickhead saying he's such a bad ass 'cause he's changed "half a million lines of C code" and he thinks I'm not writing the book correctly because I'm being too low le…

You're the dick Zed. The guy (hp) barely mentioned what you were doing at all and was just offering some general advice on C. You take it like a personal attack on your manhood. You're always defending yourself against dreamed up conspiracies. You have a serious martyr complex.

Sure he's a dick, but you know he's a dick.

Re: Learn C The Hard Way

#137

Post by eropple »

gregjor wrote: post #122
ramidarigaz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the friends I made in my CS classes were terrible with pointers. I never really understood why they didn't grasp pointers, but it was a major stumbling block for them in C/C++

K&R chapter 5.5, Character Pointers and Functions, explains pointers and shows how they are used in C. It's probably the clearest explanation of pointers ever written, and it doesn't require any understanding of hardware or assembly language (though that would help). I remember reading those three pages over and over and experimenting with the code until I got it. I probably spent several days studying the pointer ch…

Getting it or not is one thing, but I'd advocate keelhauling anyone who wrote that sort of thing in production.

The "notational convenience" is more obnoxious than anything. But, then, I'm not particularly a fan of terseness for the sake of being terse.

Re: Learn C The Hard Way

#138

Post by speckledjim »

zedshaw wrote: post #105
hp wrote: post #82

Ohloh says I've changed at least half million lines of C code ( https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/rhp/positions/total ) Play me a tiny violin ;-) What kinda bugs me is that whenever people go to teach C, they make out like it _has_ to be a low-level exercise, as if writing in C suddenly means you can't use abstract data types or object-oriented style or name your functions properly or have Unicode support. For example,…

I'm glad you got so much about how my book is written from a few paragraphs in an unfinished manuscript for it.

You should stop thinking everyone is attacking you. I think you'd be happier.

Really though, there's no content here. The fact it's been voted to #1 on hackernews shows just how bad things are.

Items should be upvoted on their merit, rather than who did them. Someone writing another book about programming C isn't newsworthy.

Re: Learn C The Hard Way

#139

Post by regularfry »

leon_ wrote: post #129
DannoHung wrote: post #111

The biggest problem with C is not the language C, for it is a small and mostly simple language with a few warts (I'm looking at you, pointer syntax), it is the ecosystem into which you are thrust when you first use it. That is, the ecosystem of, "What can I include without dicking around with compiler and linker settings, which I do not care to learn very well because I am just starting?", and the ecosystem of, "Why…

> Oh my god so many configuration settings! There are many alternatives for you that offer 1click build/deployment.

There are so many, in fact, that choosing one becomes a confusing array of choices in itself.

Re: Learn C The Hard Way

#140

Post by regularfry »

z92 wrote: post #127
alf wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C shouldn't be used for anything other than low level programming these days. There are other higher level programming language that would make your job a whole lot easier. Some programmers, like me, are stuck maintaining legacy C application code, but I wouldn't wish that fate for new programmers looking to learn C as another tool in the belt.

Other uses of C besides low level programming is: 1. Building static libraries. 2. Building so and dll. 3. Binding those so/dll with higher level languages like Ruby, Python, Perl and PHP. That is my main use of C these days. I always write the IO, user interface code in higher level languages and put all processing code in a so or dll written in C.

I've done a bit of this in Haskell, and it can be remarkably clean. It can also be a right pain, though.
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