Hacker News Reader

Comment by mkramlich | Hacker News Reader

I've seen this pattern a lot when it comes to the order of learning/mastering languages: C, then C++, then back to C

As the ancient Zen proverb goes:

The novice programmer looks at the code and sees bit, bytes, pointers and functions. The advanced programmer looks at the code and sees class hierarchies, design patterns and frameworks. The master programmer looks at the code and sees bit, bytes, pointers and functions.

Perhaps this one fits as well:

Before mastering C, bits are bits, bytes are bytes and pointers are pointers. While learning C, bits are no longer bits, bytes are no longer bytes, and pointers are no longer pointers. After mastering C, bits are once again bits, bytes are once again bytes, and pointers are once again pointers.

After getting use to the STL containers... I could never go back to pure C. I use C++ daily and love it. Nothing against C (if that's what you like) it's a great little language.

Why is it that C programmers bitch about C++, but C++ programmers don't bitch about C?

Because we're having too much fun writing cool things in C++ to bother to write rants.

Because you're too busy waiting for all that C++ code to compile before you can be too busy debugging it ..

FtFT! :)

C is still the foundation of C++. So programming in C++ made me respect C. And many great libraries are C (OpenGL, SQLite, zlib, etc.).

Programming in C++ made me realize how naive C is, in both good and bad.

And then, occasionally, Objective-C.

I'll second that. I find Objective-C nice to work with. The real issue is the lack of cross-platform compatibility (think Cocoa). The rest I write in C. That or a dynamic language. Ruby, Javascript, Python--they're all pretty much equivalent for me by now. I can transliterate code between modern implementations of all 3 without a hitch. Practically find & replace fast. Most of the semantics are roughly the same. All support JSON happily.

Lately, I've been using [Jansson](http://www.digip.org/jansson/) for JSON support in C. Wonderfully simple and fast. Also, [zeromq](http://www.zeromq.org/) for everything: logging, sockets, messages. Hoorah. F@&# yeah.

and then C can still be such a hoop jumping burden, so write some smart C libs for Lua.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com