Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by protomikron 3511 days ago
That is definitely some kind of https://xkcd.com/386/ - moment for me.

I totally disagree. I am not sure if your comment is satire or not, I would do it the other way around. Learn C as it is fundamental to modern OSes and just learn C++ if you have to (e.g. maybe later at a job, or because you need a specific library, like OpenCV). However I do not think that fully grasping C++ is a worthwile endeavor, as there are many things implemented due to historical and/or compatibility reasons (to C) and not because they provide a real benefit. Not that C is perfect but I consider it less fucked-up than C++.
2 comments
pjmlp 3511 days ago
That is the path to write unsafe and unidiomatic C++.

CppCon 2015: Kate Gregory “Stop Teaching C"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnWhqhNdYyk

link
protomikron 3511 days ago
Although I am not the big C++ fan, this is a wonderful talk and she has a great approach to teaching programming languages. Thanks!
link
jjawssd 3511 days ago
Two totally different languages with two totally different use cases. Their use cases should not overlap if applied correctly.

C++ is a very high level language compared to C. C++ has low level constructs which closely resemble C but should only be used for high performance implementations of high level abstractions.

link
protomikron 3511 days ago
You are right, it is crucial to emphasize to beginners that these languages are different (and C++ not being some kind of add-on to C, which is - considering its name - a valid guess, but we have the same discussion with Java and JavaScript). But I think learning C, Python and JavaScript (and maybe some Java) to a degree that let's you get useful work done, is a lot simpler (meaning takes less time) than learning C++.

Not that I would discourage anyone from learning C++ (ok, probably, I might) I just consider it a bad PL for people starting out with programming.

link
jjawssd 3510 days ago
Not only that, but Cython really takes away a huge amount of performance bottleneck encountered in Python code by generating pure C from a Python language superset.

More details here: http://scikit-learn.org/stable/developers/performance.html

link