The argument that one "should study other languages before they're fit to learn C" is terrible IMO and somewhat condescending. It's like saying one must learn "nedit/pico" before starting with editors like "emacs/vi". Please stop repeating that - especially if you have not done much C.
I am probably too old to understand the constant hate and criticism on why C shouldn't be taught to beginners. Not everything "has to be easy". Starting with C & Linux, I always had an advantage later in my career because it was these skills that enabled me to drill deeper than those who didn't know C & system programming.
C isn't just hard for beginners because of the language but the rest of the tool-chain. If you can get over this then learning C will also teach how to debug with gdb, strace, valgrind and learning about low level system calls, and a great deal about how a program can be loaded/structured e.g.: dynamic & static linking. Also where the resources are used and how to eliminate it’s bottlenecks. What is a heap, stack or static memory? How does memory management or garbage-collection work on a modern OS? What is IPC and how do the individual system calls function & require as input? How do you compile a program and optimize it for different target platforms? How do you write Makefiles or use autotools etc ...
Tell me again which other language forces you to learn these things? You could easily build a career just on C & Linux because of this "additional learning curve" and extra knowledge that a good C developer will have.
Sorry for all my bias (as I said my views might be very outdated :-))
I can understand if one is a) very motivated and b) has the right mindset to properly frame their ideas at the low level c operates at, C could be a good starting language. But this is not the case for many beginners.
The "to some degree agnostic of language" part has been available for a long time in computers, initially as flowcharts and later as pseudocode.
>and b) has the right mindset to properly frame their ideas at the low level c operates at, C could be a good starting language
That requires prior knowledge and practice more than a mindset, IMO.
Over a few years of working as a teaching assistant, I saw two types of students: those that had some prior knowledge and effortlessly picked up the concepts, and first-timers that had to put in serious effort to stay afloat. If you were in the former camp, it's hard to envision how the latter might feel, and why every bit of additional complexity is a menace to someone who's already struggling with frustration over internalizing the basics. If you add too much complexity, the novice becomes discouraged, gives up trying to understand, and simply tries to memorize - this is always catastrophic for them.
As an example, I'm taking about students that write code like:
if(x == true){
y = true
}
else if (x == false){
y = false
}A programmer should definitely eventually learn C, but there's no reason it needs to be their first language and definitely no reason it should be their only language.
They'll only wonder that if the book / course / instructor teaching them C, does NOT explain it to them. Which would be more of a reflection on said book / course / instructor than on the C language or the students.
Second, your point may (or not) be correct, but it is at best tangentially related to the point I was replying to, or to mine.
If the student doesn't have to focus on remembering whether or not you need a semicolon or a colon on switch statement cases, they can focus more on actually grokking the process of translating thoughts and algorithms to code.
Python is great but some of the things I've come across:
Why do some keywords use parenthesis and others don't?
What's this Python 2/3 hubbub all about?
What are __INIT__ and __MAIN__?
Why do I see single, double, and triple quoted strings?
What does the u prefix mean in u"Hello World"?I can agree with this, if not moreso the fact that you also have to learn the underlying system when you learn C.
For example, I 'learned' C from Greg Perry's "C Programming in 12 Easy Lessons". I was 11 or 12 years old at the time, had played around with a few other languages, but I knew C was the language video games were written in, so I wanted to learn C.
Part of the reason I wanted to buy that book was because it came with a compiler, Borland C++ 1.0. The book was also only $29.99 and was at a store in town. You'd be learning how to use functions like fscanf() but they never covered the details of 'when things go wrong'. You're missing some bytes, your file is incorrect, DOS does this while UNIX does that... You learn just enough to get you in trouble.
Sure, one book can't teach you everything, but it wasn't quite enough to give you a real good understanding of how C worked.
http://www.amazon.com/C-Programming-12-Easy-Lessons/dp/06723...
I eventually bought a game programming book and started to learn all the 'hard' stuff that I didn't even dream about when I first started. x86 interrupts, accessing joysticks and sound cards, writing to video memory...
All of this can be solved to a point by dumbing it down and using libraries. You still have to make sure you've got things like pointers down, though. You don't quite have to worry about that stuff with say, QuickBASIC or Turbo Pascal.
The reason I think this is important to point out is that I believe programming knowledge could be more widespread than it is today but unforgiving beginning languages tend to weed out people who aren't as familiar with computers as we are.
In the end people will always choose the tool they're most comfortable with, whether it's the right tool for the job or not. I have no problem with this because, if there are not enough C experts in the team to maintain the project, it would be a good enough reason why a high-level language becomes the "right tool for the job".
I think I agree.
> It's like saying one must learn "nedit/pico" before starting with editors like "emacs/vi".
It's very little like that. Other languages have their own strengths in a way that nedit/pico do not.
The first language you should learn should be a doddle to learn, even if it isn't very powerful. This was BASIC (or sometimes Logo) back in the 80s, but you could probably substitute Python or even Scheme today. This language teaches you concepts like these:
* Computers follow instructions supplied by the programmer
* The instructions have to be carefully worded in order for a computer to follow them (i.e., intro to errors and debugging)
* Arithmetic and mathematical operations a computer can perform
* Computers can remember things (i.e., variables)
* Computers can interact with the world (input and output)
* Computers can make decisions (conditionals and program flow control)
These are the very fundamentals of programming and it's amazing how many people haven't internalized these concepts at a deep level.
You can actually get very far with BASIC -- entire companies have been run with BASIC code. (Software written in and for Business BASIC variants was a major industry back in the 1970s and 1980s.) You can get even farther with Python. But once the learner is ready to go deeper, it's time to begin Phase 2.
The second language you learn should be assembly, which familiarizes the programmer with how a computer actually works at a fundamental level, as well as important concepts like CPU word length, memory addresses (essential for understanding pointers), program call and return (and stacks), etc. You don't have to even complete a large project written in assembly to get the benefits of this low-level, bit-twiddling learning.
Finally, the last language you learn should be Pascal. C or C++ would be today's equivalent. In this phase you synthesize the knowledge of high-level programming, structure, and control flow that you learned during your "BASIC" phase with your low-level understanding of machine details that you learned during your assembly phase. Then, the details of how and why the language works the way it does make much more sense.
So yes, to me it makes total sense to teach C -- as (at least) a third programming language, perhaps after several years of proficiency are acquired in the other two (depending on the student).
I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, mind you, but it's important to note the distinction.
Using an analogy; starting out with C is like learning to drive by being told how an internal combustion engine works, and then you're asked to wire up your pedals manually and install a fuel tank of sufficient size before you're allowed to learn how to put the car in gear.
Those are all useful things to know, but you can learn them after you know how to drive, and your knowledge of either topic (driving and automotive engineering) is not in any way impaired by learning it in a different order.
How common is it for people to get better understanding by travelling in other programming cultures ? My personal experience goes this way but I rarely hear it.
- tiny set of builtins: list, dict, set - literal - slices - small syntax, and canonical indentation - simple mapping between some operators and class methods
you have enough to abstract a bit but not too much without drowning in details.
"Learning C is not necessary for everyone, but there are many posts on Reddit and programming forums with authors who feel like they’re missing something, and I wonder if this is part of what they’re looking for."
And I don't know how I feel about C as a first language. I don't believe it would be worse than Java, which was the intro course at my Uni, but my first language was BASIC of all things, which is good in some respects as it really is a "Beginners" language, but both C and BASIC could encourage sloppy practices without good instruction and C especially has some gotchas.
Ruby -- puts "Hello World"
Python -- print "Hello World"
Lua -- print("Hello World")
Personally I wish every programmer would eventually learn C. Getting down to that low level and really understanding how things work is important, but if it is the first language I think we would end up with a whole lot less programmers as many would give up early.
Python is written in C
Lua is written in C
Ruby has also been implemented in Java (JRuby), Ruby (Rubinius), .NET (IronRuby), JavaScript (Opal).
Python in Java (Jython) and .NET (IronPython)
Lua has been implemented in too many language for me to list them all here (C, C++, Lua, JavaScript, Erlang, OCaml, Go, etc...)
It seems C itself was initially bootstrapped from B which was bootstrapped from BCPL. If we were to follow this to it's logical conclusion I'm guessing we end up at some version of Assembly. Are you suggesting we should start budding programmers on Assembly?
You meant Ruby, Python and Lua have their reference implementations written in C. They all also have other implementations written in other languages.
int main(void) {
(* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * printf)("C is awesome\n");
return 0;
} #include <stdio.h>
int main(void) {
(* * & * * * * * & * * * * * * * * * * * * * printf)(&1["C is awesome\n"]-3/2);
}
Why? the C standard library is full of gotchas and tricks and goofy shit that makes it unsuitable for new programmers. The comp.lang.c FAQ should be standard reading material for anyone taking a C class. Look at all the posts on StackOverflow about the stdio functions 'not working right' and asking how to do menial things like collect keypresses.
C works well as a first language if you teach it like assembly (use of which as a teaching language is another debate): flip some bits and do some loops. But not for collecting user input/output. Half of your students are going to get stuck trying to collect a list of names from the user, before they even get a chance to get stuck trying to sort the list.