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Ask HN: Do CS students enjoy C anymore?

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Re: Ask HN: Do CS students enjoy C anymore?

#24

Post by mdwrigh2 »

smackfu wrote: post #22

Did anyone ever enjoy writing C, especially data structures? Here is what I remember from college: ./program Segmentation fault.

I actually had the option of using a few languages for my Data Structures/Algorithms class, and chose C. Granted, execution time was a competition and I'm a relatively competitive person by nature, so that influenced, but it really wasn't all that painful, and in fact direct control of pointers made some of the data structures easier to manage, in my opinion. Plus being on top of the rankings for efficiency is always nice :)

Re: Ask HN: Do CS students enjoy C anymore?

#25

Post by epochwolf »

smackfu wrote: post #22

Did anyone ever enjoy writing C, especially data structures? Here is what I remember from college: ./program Segmentation fault.

I had fun dealing with input management using the standard library only. Without any directions on how it worked or what to use.

Re: Ask HN: Do CS students enjoy C anymore?

#26

Post by Pyrodogg »

metamemetics wrote: post #21

You could hire Computer Engineering instead of Computer Science majors, they usually all know C well even if they practiced it in relation to hardware\embedded systems. [at UIUC everyone does C++ Data Structures, but CS starts with Java, CE starts with C ]

Ditto.

CompE graduate here, my C education was almost exclusive to microcontrollers. The only other class that focused on C was the operating systems class. Both were fairly low-level in their respective areas.

Re: Ask HN: Do CS students enjoy C anymore?

#27

Post by fshaun »

"CS" is broad; targeting specialties within the program may work better. I used tons of C for operating systems and networking lab courses, but I had friends focusing on (for instance) HCI or AI who rarely touched it.

Also consider looking at physics and aero-astro majors. Lots of embedded or algorithmic work, so I hypothesize lower level languages like C are more common.

Re: Ask HN: Do CS students enjoy C anymore?

#28

Post by balgarath »

Long-time lurker, this is my first post to HN.

My school(Tennessee Technological University, graduated a year and a half ago) still requires a semester of C/C++...there were a couple other classes where you needed to know it to interpret the professor's example code, but were allowed to code in other languages if you wanted. I enjoy C, but feel more proficient in other languages as far as getting things done quickly. I guess I just don't use C enough to keep a good grasp of it.

I think students would get more benefit out of being forced to only use C(and assembly?) for the first couple years. It would help them get a better understanding of what the higher-level languages have going on under the hood.

I've been doing web development(Ruby) the past few years. I've played around with extending Ruby with C, but not much.

If you are looking to hire, I might be interested...its about time for a change-up in my life.

Re: Ask HN: Do CS students enjoy C anymore?

#29

Post by hendler »

As a teaching language, I did enjoy C. I didn't know C when I was studying CS, and until then I used higher level languages that did all sorts of inexplicable things. C was the one layer above assembly that made sense, and helped highlight when something was really a hardware issue versus an algorithmic issue. (eg. limitations of mmap and fseek in relation to database performance)

For production, I wish I had the time or need to optimize code I write, but too often, a server upgrade and reconfiguration is sufficient. At least I depend on some one else writing something great in C (linux, nginx, etc).

Been looking at GoLang and Clang to make the experience a little less painful.

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