[chownie]

> C genuinely is easy to pick up.

I feel like this is a bit of an https://xkcd.com/2501/ situation.

C is considered easy to pick up for the average user posting HN comments because we have the benefit of years -- the average comp sci student, who has been exposed to Javascript and Python, who might not know what "pass by reference" even means... I'm not sure they're going to be considering C easy.

[names_r_hard]

I've taught several different languages to both 1st year uni students, and new joiners to a technical company, where they had no programming background.

Honestly, C seems to be one of the easier languages to teach the basics of. It's certainly easier than Java or C++, which have many more concepts.

C has some concepts that confuse the hell out of beginners, and it will let you shoot yourself in the foot very thoroughly with them (much more than say, Java). But you don't tend to encounter them till later on.

I have never said getting good at C is easy. Just that it's easy to pick up.

[wkjagt]

C made a lot more sense to me after having done assembly (6502 in my case, but it probably doesn't matter). Things like passing a reference suddenly just made sense.

[F3nd0]

I agree. For me as a beginner, C was relatively easy to learn the basics of. Sure, I never went on to get familiar with all the details and become proficient in it, but the basic concepts really aren’t that hard to understand. There’s just not too much you need to wrap your head around.

[pixelmonkey]

C is taught as the introduction to programming in CS50x, Harvard's wildly popular MOOC for teaching programming to first-year college students and lifelong learners via the internet. Using the clang toolchain gives you much better error messages than old versions of gcc used to give. And I bet AI/LLM/copilot tools are pretty good at C given how much F/OSS is written in C.

Just to provide another data point here... that C is a little easier to pick up, today, than it was in the 1990s or 2000s, when all you had was the K&R C book and a Linux shell. I regularly recommend CS50x to newcomers to programming via a guide I wrote up as a GitHub gist. I took the CS50x course myself in 2020 (just to refresh my own memory of C after years of not using it that much), and it is very high quality.

See this comment for more info:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40690760

[jibal]

Everything is passed by reference in Python. Everything is passed by value in C.

[__mharrison__]

Not quite true for Python but a close approximation.

[jcelerier]

depends on which school you went? the one I've been to started with C and LISP in the 2010s and then moved on to C++ and java with some python