Learn C programming and the rest will come

Re:Learn C programming and the rest will come by detaro on Friday January 10, 2020 @01:34AM (#22008803)

Responding to the title: Not really, no. Neither is C necessarily a great starting point, nor does knowing C necessarily help you being good at other languages etc.

I'm not saying learning C isn't useful, but it's far from a necessity and learning other things early can be more effective.

The article itself doesn't really contain the claim the title makes, but also doesn't back it up very much, just some fairly generic "C is low-level" points.

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Re:Learn C programming and the rest will come by zabana on Friday January 10, 2020 @02:17AM (#22008992)

I understand what you're trying to say as I am living proof that you can still be a successful programmer without starting with C.

But I should at least mention that learning C and tinkering with system / network programming helped me improve my understanding of higher level languages in a way I didn't think was conceivable.

Learning about and dealing with memory management, system calls, how code is compiled and translated into machine code etc can be boring and repetitive if you do it long enough but is I believe an essential component of becoming a wiser/better programmer (at least in my experience).

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Re:Learn C programming and the rest will come by anta40 on Friday January 10, 2020 @04:38AM (#22009714)

Yeah, I'm not sure how my C experience can aid me learning Haskell, Scala, Lisp, etc.

I'd say if you are just a hobbyist programmer, learning C is probably not always a necessary. Go/Python/Pascal/Java etc is fine.

Once you are interested in poking Linux internals, obviously this is where your C knowledge is needed.

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