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Comment by speleo_engr | Hacker News Reader

Sure you can learn a lot but I have no idea why you would choose Turbo C in 2020 over say a Raspberry Pi with GCC. Turbo C (discontinued in 1990) is going to expose a bunch of irrelevant things today, as even most microcontrollers are 32-bit:

painful 16-bit near/far memory model

a single task operating system (DOS) that has been long obsolete

no support for networking or threads

I could go on and on.

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In going from zero to programmer those aren't bad things, they are a simplified learning model.

Would you advocate pilots stop learning to fly in single engine prop planes and instead jump right into the cockpit of an Airbus because that's what they will encounter in the workforce?

Any why are doctors practicing on dead people when clearly they can't possibly help them or cure anything that way...

A 16-bit space is not at all simplified, it's far more complex. Because of that, it is a terrible choice. It's a much more difficult memory model to learn in. In a flat 32-bit address space, a pointer is a pointer and it just works. It's much easier to conceptualize and learn on. Have you ever programmed for a bank switched memory computer? It's a nightmare. It's extra mental gymnastics pushed on the developer that have been irrelevant for a long time.

I don't think your example is a valid comparison. It's more like do you think all teenagers need to learn to drive a horse driven carriage before they learn on a modern car?

None of that matters to someone learning how to implement a stack, a linked list, quick sort, etc.

It does though, if you mix near and far pointers, you are going to be getting crashes. Pointer equality and comparison are non-trivial. Whereas on a modern 32-bit CPU you don't have any such distinction.

Wow, how did you learn all this stuff?

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