221–230 of 260 posts
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.
Has anyone actually used "Learn Python the Hard Way" in a beneficial way? I started it several times but never got very far and just learned Python from other sources. I didn't really care for the approach.
The critical factor, IMHO, is clarity and conciseness of writing. Zed does a good job with this (I didn't know his name until this thread, BTW).
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I never really understood why they didn't grasp pointers The root of the problem is the language designers' loose use of star. "star something" is contained in a phrase that means one thing at declaration, "star something" has a different meaning the rest of the time. #include void eg(int i) { int *j = &i; // "huh? Put the address of i into *j?" *j = *j + 1; printf("%d\n", *j); } int main() { eg(4); } With more detai…
That's because of the (visually) 'wrong' use of * (wrong in the sense that it's unintuitive). The key is that * is part of the type of the declaration, not of the variable; an int* is not an int. So int *j = &i; is more correctly expressed and easier to understand when written like int* j = &i; The only reason to put the * in front of the variable name is when declaring several pointers in one line. So the solution i…
Stroustrup wrote something somewhere where he explained that int* a; is more appropriate for use in C++ because C++ is supposed to be more focused on types, and int * a; is more appropriate for C because of something about C's philosophy, but I can't remember what. I wish they would have changed the syntax for C++, but I guess he couldn't have while still keeping C++ a superset of C.
edit: found it: http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq2.html#whitespace
"A ``typical C programmer'' writes ``int p;'' and explains it ``p is what is the int'' emphasizing syntax, and may point to the C (and C++) declaration grammar to argue for the correctness of the style. Indeed, the * binds to the name p in the grammar.
A ``typical C++ programmer'' writes ``int* p;'' and explains it ``p is a pointer to an int'' emphasizing type. Indeed the type of p is int*. I clearly prefer that emphasis and see it as important for using the more advanced parts of C++ well."
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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…
It is possible to program C with a functional mindset, but the syntax does get in the way. The function syntax does not distinguish between parameters that are modified but you can by convention, and use of structs to bundle stuff up. You can pass function pointers liberally. In the end though the number of use cases for C is smaller now, and you should be able to avoid it for large projects and only use it for small…
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' Is this a fair paraphrase? "Everyone here isn't attacking you, also, your draft sucks and shouldn't have been posted on HN."' No, it's not. speckledjim is complaining that someone writing another book on C is not news, he doesn't say anything about the draft sucking.
Implied by "Really though, there's no content here." Maybe they meant the comments, though.
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I find it is much more helpful, when teaching C, to avoid the word 'address', and call (&) the pointer-to operator. Thinking of pointers as numbers (which the address-analogy does) tends to be harmful for newer C programmers because they want to treat them like numbers.
They are numbers (either 32-bit or 64-bit). Nothing more, nothing less. I don't understand why you wouldn't want to think of them that way. For example... const char* current = "ohai thar"; const char* end = current + strlen( current ); assert( end >= current ); size_t bytecount = (end - current); (size_t is an unsigned type, so if 'end' is less than 'current', it will overflow. If you want to allow for that, use ptr…
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I find it is much more helpful, when teaching C, to avoid the word 'address', and call (&) the pointer-to operator. Thinking of pointers as numbers (which the address-analogy does) tends to be harmful for newer C programmers because they want to treat them like numbers.
You'd still need to explain pointer arithmetic somehow.
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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++
I never really understood why they didn't grasp pointers The root of the problem is the language designers' loose use of star. "star something" is contained in a phrase that means one thing at declaration, "star something" has a different meaning the rest of the time. #include void eg(int i) { int *j = &i; // "huh? Put the address of i into *j?" *j = *j + 1; printf("%d\n", *j); } int main() { eg(4); } With more detai…
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 are writing firmware, for example, the exact sequence of memory writes is critical. Program the hardware registers in the wrong order, and the device doesn't work. Access the FIFO the wrong way, and your ISR has a data race. Hiding memory access from the programmer is useless when accessing memory correctly is the problem. C is pretty much the only usable language for this kind of work.
The guys writing kernels and system-level libraries face similar issues.
So, C is stateful because the hardware is stateful. C has raw pointers because the hardware has raw pointers. C doesn't manage memory for you because you don't want C to manage memory for you. This all makes sense when you realize that C was invented for writing operating systems.
So, while I do understand your criticism, I think you are looking at this from the wrong angle. The electrical engineering guys build the hardware, and the C guys make the hardware boot up. Fancy functional programming languages are useless without real machines to run on, and C makes those machines go. It's part of the plumbing, just like transistors. Plumbing may be messy and unpleasant, but even the architects designing skyscrapers need to know how it works.
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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…
Why is it that every comment I read by you is either you whining about being treated unfairly or you attacking someone who supposedly "attacked" you? Are you honestly that insecure? Do you read every comment as though it is in some way attempting to degrade your image? Here you denigrate the HN community, saying it doesn't generate a significant amount of traffic for your site or whatever, and then go on to say you w…