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by themodelplumber 3010 days ago
I'd be interested to know what circumstances made the concept flourish. Massively popular yet difficult-to-program devices sitting in every home?

If I could go back in time I would have stuck with QBasic for at least another five years before moving to C. I wasn't close to ready for the briefly exciting dive into "real" coding, which led to abstract CS concepts, the thick books with exciting illustrations on the covers, the CS classes which were so boring. Meanwhile I believe I could have actually been shipping software had I stuck with QB. Gar to admit but true.
1 comments
pjmlp 3010 days ago
I was lucky to have started in 8 bit machines, and having used Basic and Pascal compilers before ever touching C.

There wasn't a single new concept regarding low level hardware programming that C teached me, on the contrary, I got to learn how not to do it.

And I wasn't infected by the "micro-optimize each line of code as it gets written" culture, rather I was shipping software that was fast enough to keep its users happy.

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