[voidlogic]

Extremely uninteresting- It is like a page of "C-S 1XX: Intro to C" fell out of its bindings and landed on Hacker News.

This might have been mildly interesting if there had been the assembly for a few different architectures (x86, MIPS, ARM, PowerPC, etc) showing how the C code was translated to assembler for each. And could have been very interesting with an additional discussion of memory barriers and atomic operations in C and their relation to assignments and pointers.

[holyjaw]

Amendment: 'Extremely uninteresting' -TO YOU-.

As someone who has had difficulty picking up real programming languages, and has only found some marginal success due to Obj-C's ARC feature, I can tell you this puts everything I've read in to much better perspective.

Try not to be so negative, man, I think it's clear you weren't even the intended target anyways.

[minimax]

HN has a pretty broad audience and a pretty big chunk of it doesn't know $language. These types of beginner posts for $language pop up from time to time. It's nothing to worry about.

[voidlogic]

$language in this case is C, the lingua franca of computing.

It is almost always the first language ported to any system, almost every computer science program at least covers the basics, it has been in 1st/2nd place on the TIOBE index for over a decade, its the 5th most popular language on github by commits and it is over 40 years old.

But- I'm willing to accept there might be people on Hacker news that don't know C, thats why I gave suggestions to the author to expand on the content and make it interesting to a wider audience. That was the point of my post.

[mturmon]

Posts on elementary topics (should be) noteworthy only if mastery is exhibited. Hence, griping.

[ultimoo]

I agree. I liked the opening line though: "C is memory with syntactic sugar." It is a good introductory article for someone who has never used C -- CS-1xx Intro as you said.

[greenyoda]

"Syntactic sugar" generally means a syntax that's just a nicer-looking version of something that can be equivalently expressed in a more fundamental syntax. But C is more than that: it provides a way of abstracting away the details of the machine so that you don't have to explicitly deal with the fact that your machine has 64-bit pointers and 2's complement integer arithmetic and IEEE floating point and an instruction set that handles shift operations in a particular way.

So a better formulation might be: "C provides an abstraction layer on top of a computer's memory model and instruction set that will allow your code to be portable between different machine architectures, but only if you play strictly by the rules."

By the way, the classic K&R book explains the fundamentals of C pretty well. If you really want to understand C, I'd recommend reading it cover to cover (it's pretty short).

[denniskubes]

I was trying to describe a simple mental model that has been helpful to me. While I agree assembly details would have been interesting putting that in would have lost more than half the audience.

[nemetroid]

> putting that in would have lost more than half the audience.

I surely hope not.

[blt]

The least they could have done is explain how structs work.