In Defense of Learning Code the Hard Way

motherboard.vice.com

4 pointsrvern2 comments

The moment I understood pointers, It felt like you discovered an entire world, tied by logic, pure as crystal. Learning C++ helped me a lot to understand oriented object programming and manual memory managing. Now, I am a web developer doing some JavaScript.

I think the weakest point of JavaScript online programming courses is the lack of algorithms. You end up to do a lot of DOM manipulations, apply some CSS and that's it you are ready to get a job. But you don't really know how to translate your mental concepts into code.

I love the new languages like Go, Rust, Clojure, Node, ... but learning C on Unix has taught me more about computers than any of the (new) stuff I picked up in the past 10 years combined.

Debugging with gdb, strace, valgrind, lsof, ... and learning about low level system calls will teach you a great deal about how a program works, where it’s resources are used and how to eliminate it’s bottlenecks. What is a heap, stack or static memory? How does memory management or garbage-collection work on a modern OS? What is IPC and how do the individual system calls function & require as input? ...

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