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by ddlutz 1698 days ago
I think the Scheme quote is interesting, because it almost applies to C.

Most people consider learning C hard (for example, compared to python), but it is an extremely small language with a "standard library so small it's pretty much useless".

3 comments

C is hard because despite being a "small" language, it's full of all kinds of unintuitive rules and behaviour for beginners to stumble upon, and the language provides next to no assistance in avoiding the pitfalls. People have to learn C by making potentially dangerous mistakes, hopefully in code where they don't matter.
What makes C somewhat hard to learn is pointers and strings. Apart from that it's so small that most fulltime C developers will touch upon the entire language on a regular basis.
I'd recommend then read musl though and not that atrocity that is glibc
I also recommend musl. The code is just much more readable. I couldn't even find what I was looking for in glibc source code.