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Learn C

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Re: Learn C

#111

Post by siddboots »

webreac wrote: post #89
andrewvc wrote: post #4

This is a fair point, but it brings to mind another point I didn't really understand till the last couple of years. Learning about how compilers work is just as important. Building a small lisp compiler was a life-changing experience for me in terms of going one level deeper, as much as understanding C was. For those who've never written lisp before, the reason I recommend a lisp compiler is that lisp compilers are t…

I do not understand the hype around clojure. I think functional programming languages have mainly evolved to introduce stronger typing and to remove the parenthesis. I wish a great future to scala (and haskell). For me, clojure is outdated.

I suppose it's because functional programming isn't a one-trick shop. There is a paradigm that comes out of lisp macros that can't be accomplished within a language like Scala or Haskell, even though those languages are superior in many other respects.

Re: Learn C

#112

Post by zedshaw »

andrewvc wrote: post #4

This is a fair point, but it brings to mind another point I didn't really understand till the last couple of years. Learning about how compilers work is just as important. Building a small lisp compiler was a life-changing experience for me in terms of going one level deeper, as much as understanding C was. For those who've never written lisp before, the reason I recommend a lisp compiler is that lisp compilers are t…

Hell yeah, learning how to make compilers should be what a BS in CS is all about. Pretty much everything in computer science can be turned into a language and compilers have almost all of the major topics in CS as one easily explainable thing. It's also one of the few parts of CS that stands on a solid logical proof filled footing and is still insanely practical.

I basically teach baby compiler theory at the end of my Python book without people even noticing because I think parsing at a minimum is so important.

Re: Learn C

#113

Post by LowKarmaAccount »

1123581321 wrote: post #67
trimbo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We already have a problem with a massive, unreliable, insecure ecosystem of legacy C code A ton of the world's software with the highest reliability requirements is written in C and C++. Nuclear power plants? Yes. [1] Joint Strike Fighter? Yes. [2] Mars rover? Yes. [3] Your Tesla? Yes [4] US telephone systems. Stock exchanges. Bloomberg. Your cell phone OS (incl. many years before smartphones). The list goes on and…

The use of C and C-likes by the JPL rather than Lisp is a sad story; it means robotics has not advanced as fast as it could have. http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

I love the postscript of this:

"It is nonetheless supremely ironic that the demise of Lisp at JPL was ultimately due in no small measure to the unreliability of a C program."

Re: Learn C

#114

Post by zedshaw »

betterunix wrote: post #9

We need less code written in C, not more. We already have a problem with a massive, unreliable, insecure ecosystem of legacy C code that is hard to escape; writing more software in C makes that problem worse. Most software is written to solve high-level problems. Using a high-level language is sensible, time-saving, budget-saving, improves portability, and saves on headaches later. The same rule that applies to COBOL…

Not really. What we need is people not learning C (or any language) without also learning how writing it wrong causes defects. In my book (mentioned in the post) I have students using Valgrind and attempting to break their code starting at the 4th lesson. I also show them how and why to avoid defects in C.

Instead of saying "no new C", we should probably be approaching it with a two-pronged attack. First, tracking down bad educational material and making sure new C coders learn how to make safer C. Second, fixing the older code so that it is safe by default, rather than only in the context of the code it's written in.

But, yeah pipe dreams and all, so I just work on improving the educational material.

Re: Learn C

#115

Post by Teckla »

kmm wrote: post #21
betterunix wrote: post #9

We need less code written in C, not more. We already have a problem with a massive, unreliable, insecure ecosystem of legacy C code that is hard to escape; writing more software in C makes that problem worse. Most software is written to solve high-level problems. Using a high-level language is sensible, time-saving, budget-saving, improves portability, and saves on headaches later. The same rule that applies to COBOL…

Was there any study done to the (un)reliability of C? I know for a fact practically every piece software I use is programmed in either C or C++. The sole exceptions are Anki and Gentoo's portage system, both Python. And I'm pretty sure the reason portage is so extremely slow is because it is in Python (I've checked, it's not I/O-bound). And Anki is some very unreliable software. In fact, give me a single big desktop…

In fact, give me a single big desktop software project made with a language that is not C or C++.

I find your requirements odd and vague (why big? why desktop?), but speaking just for myself: Eclipse, jEdit, CyberDuck -- all written in Java.

I use plenty of applications written in C and C++ too, of course; but I think that's largely due to (1) inertia in the application development industry, and (2) it took a while for runtime environments like the JVM to perform well, so they got a bad reputation early on that's no longer really deserved -- but the reputation persists in the minds of many developers.

Re: Learn C

#116

Post by zedshaw »

binarycrusader wrote: post #12
mimog wrote: post #7

How does a musician without any formal CS education and a admitted lack of understanding of some very fundamental software things, such as pointers and memory, land a San Francisco dev job? I thought those jobs were in very high demand

You'd be surprised at how far "not an asshole, actively learns, and is good at programming" can get someone.

Not as far as "total asshole, does coke, and actively kisses ass" does at the same companies.

Re: Learn C

#117

Post by zedshaw »

bmoresbest55 wrote: post #91

I have to totally agree with this. I have almost completed Learn Python The Hard Way and it has been very good to me. I have been programming in many different languages while in school (I just graduated this May, lucky me...). I must say that this might be the most complete way that I have seen to learn a new language. I am definitely doing Learn C The Hard Way and I am definitely going to donate/pay for these mater…

Thanks! Glad you liked my book.

Any criticisms for improvements?

Re: Learn C

#118

Post by jacques_chester »

zedshaw wrote: post #116
binarycrusader wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised at how far "not an asshole, actively learns, and is good at programming" can get someone.

Not as far as "total asshole, does coke, and actively kisses ass" does at the same companies.

And you've only got 1 out of 3. :)

Re: Learn C

#119

Post by austinz »

tracker1 wrote: post #109
austinz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed; OS kernels and firmware for embedded systems all require low-level access to hardware in a way that high-level desktop applications do not. Being able to easily reason about how C is going to use resources and be compiled down to machine code for the architecture you are using can sometimes be an important asset.

I think that the point is that even if you accept that the kernel level code and device drivers are all in C, from there, there's less and less benefit to doing userland code in C from there... you could use Lisp, Erlang, Scheme or a number of other languages for userland and service oriented code. Although I really don't care for Unity, or Windows 8's UI's I do appreciate some of the directions they are going in ter…

I agree with you; in the cases you mentioned there don't seem to be any good arguments for not using a higher-level language with managed memory, properly implemented data structures, etc.

It seems like there are at least two threads of thought going on in the comments in general. One of them is, "does C have any role in any domain, and if so what is that domain?". I think that it does; software development is much wider than kernels, userland applications, and compilers, and there are fields where C and/or C++ are the right tools as things currently stand. I don't think anyone would argue that either language exists as a global optimum in any problem space, but from an engineering (rather than a theoretical purism) standpoint sometimes there are few practical alternatives. Maybe these domains are small, maybe they're unexciting, but they do exist.

The other is, "what is the point of learning C?". Maybe they want a deeper understanding of manual memory management, the concept of stack and heap storage, pointer manipulation, etc. Learning more about C to play with these concepts isn't a terrible idea, although it's not the only way to learn about these things. If nothing else, learning C and trying to implement your own parsers or data structures might be a good way to better understand why writing correct code in C that accounts for buffer overflows and string issues is so difficult, and what challenges higher-level languages face in order to overcome these flaws.

Re: Learn C

#120

Post by amasad »

While I agree that all programmers should learn how computers and compilers work. Learning C would just be a mean to that end. You could easily replace "Learn C" with "Learn Assembly" in this post.

I think these type of posts reinforces the over-emphasis on languages, frameworks, and tools in general we have in this industry. People restrict themselves into camps of certain tools and then use that specific tool as a general purpose tool for all problems they face in a sort of nationalistic way. And then go on the internet and start arguing over which over-used hammer is better, so to speak. Now, what is worse is that newcomers to programming quickly adopt this attitude which makes it even harder for them to learn the right things.

The other day I made a trip to the Academy for Software engineering NYC[1] and it was a great experience watching kids learn how to program. They were using Python to learn. However, I was really disappointed when a few kids expressed interest in learning Foo language because someone told them that Foo was the best language ever! I told them that after learning how to compute, they can go on and learn all the languages they want to learn and even create their own.

[1]: http://www.afsenyc.org/

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