[3fe9a03ccd14ca5]

> The best thing you can do is finding some open source code that interest you, read it and write it.

Has reading source code in a language that’s unfamiliar to you shown to be of any real benefit to learning? It seems you need at least a little bit of foundational experience with it before your brain can even parse what you’re seeing in a beneficial way.

[clarry]

> Has reading source code in a language that’s unfamiliar to you shown to be of any real benefit to learning?

Absolutely! You start finding idiomatic patterns and "oh, so that's how they do it" kind of things. Find library functions you never knew about but now you do. Find weird things, and look them up in a manual/reference/SO/chatroom. Things that you might find in a book, but a book that covers all the idioms and practice and weird things is gonna be as thick as the bible, and it'll get outdated (it doesn't help that most books are focused on teaching the basics rather than showing off how to architect your application well). Things that you can learn the hard way by why not look and see and learn?

> It seems you need at least a little bit of foundational experience with it before your brain can even parse what you’re seeing in a beneficial way.

Nah, you just need programming experience (in a similar paradigm) in general. A lot of what you learned from languages before will translate.

Also OP mentioned that "I can write C" and "I've started reading 'Modern C'", so it's not like they're looking for their first Hello World snippet.

OP said they've got 15+ years of programming experience. At that point, picking up a new language is all about learning the vocabulary and idioms, plus the few unique or tricky or quirky things that don't show up in other languages (or that aren't obvious from looking at code). The fastest way to get to that vocabulary is to look at real code.

[pritovido]

>Has reading source code in a language that’s unfamiliar to you shown to be of any real benefit to learning?

Yes, I think so. The parent has experience with other languages, like python, javascript and go. C has a very similar paradigm. If it were clojure it would be different.

I find exposition to new languages real usage the best way to learn them. I went to the UK to learn english, Germany to learn German, could be painful at first, but works, specially if you know a little about what is all about.

Your brain makes sense of everything by itself in a magical way. That is the way you learn your native language.

[dandigangi]

I'd tend to agree here also. I didn't start reading source code until a couple years in because I couldn't really put it to use. It becomes 10x more valuable when I was deep into my career learning from the big shots.

It _can_ help no doubt but not sure that's the best way to start. Especially with a language like C. It's not so straight forward without some training or CS education.

[clarry]

> It becomes 10x more valuable when I was deep into my career learning from the big shots.

Yeah well OP said they've 15+ years of experience so..

> Especially with a language like C. It's not so straight forward without some training or CS education.

I agree with pritovido, when they say C is a very simple language. Sure, it has grown its quirks and gotchas along with some cruft (the kind of things you wouldn't learn about in a CS curriculum anyway), but at its core it really is very simple.

[hombre_fatal]

For me there's almost no wisdom to assimilate when reading source code until I've given a fair shot at using the language and experiencing its obstacles. Then seeing other people overcome them is where almost all of the a-ha moments are.