I think many programmers forget how it was to learn to program. Imagine the horror trying to make Rusts borrow checker happy without even understanding what an object scope or pointer is.
C is a really good beginner's language, since any oop is explicit with function calls, kinda like Basic. No invisible destructors etc. Modern compilers even warns you on returning pointers to stack locals etc.
I don't think Python is a good beginners language anymore with all its complexity. Maybe Go or Java.
Agreed. C is a great starting point. It's a terrible continuing point though. Novice C programmers write seg-faulty code left and right, which is fine. That's not a problem; everything that's wrong is on the surface. In the mean time, they've learned how to implement a binary search tree or something, which is pretty cool when you do it in C. The intermediate two-star C programmer whose programs almost never segfault, that's the truly dangerous one. Precious few C programmers make it past that stage.
Ye, unless you to electrical engineering/close to hardware embedded or something. However even those probably benefits from mastering some memory managed language, before going back to C.
Good points. Though it would be a good debate that Go would be a better beginner language. Java's forcing of class based OOP would cause an avalanche of other kinds of problems that Go and C don't have to deal with.
> Imagine trying to learn Rust without experience with C. Oh man.
I don't think it's that bad - primarily because error messages are way more helpful, but also because it'll error about things that C would just choke on at runtime.
(I learnt/continue to learn Rust with only 'university C', fwiw.)
C's simplicity is an illusion. The vast quantity of footguns and edge cases make writing correct C extremely complicated.
> And on top of that you have to learn three instead of just one!
You don't need to learn all of those, select one based on what your goals are. And it's not like gaining a surface-level understanding of any of these programming languages would take more than a week to a month anyway.
> Imagine trying to learn Rust without experience with C. Oh man.
It's quite the opposite. Rust is a dream to learn compared to C. The Rust compiler is like having a personal tutor at your beck and call to teach you systems programming best-practices. Without exaggeration, these days I would not suggest someone start learning C until they have learned Rust.
They aren’t necessarily advocating learning C so that they can write lots of production code in C. They are advocating learning C to better understand lower layers of programming.
The basics of C are easy and illustrative. And given that the main Python interpreter is written in C, can be helpful to know.
C is a really good beginner's language, since any oop is explicit with function calls, kinda like Basic. No invisible destructors etc. Modern compilers even warns you on returning pointers to stack locals etc.
I don't think Python is a good beginners language anymore with all its complexity. Maybe Go or Java.