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Comment by guhcampos | Hacker News Reader

C should be the only foundational language.

People should first learn to manage their memory, ensure their typing and the boundaries of their variable allocations before having someone do that for them.

It's a little bit like driving: in the US you can get a driver's license without ever touching a stick shift car, so you have this huge driver population than can only drive automatics.

Which is fine for the general populace, but not if you want to be a race car driver, a machine operator or a mechanic, which is where the computer science student would fall into the analogy.

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Certainly x86 Assembly should be the only foundational language.

People should first learn to manage their registers and memory addresses, ensure their typing and the boundaries of their variable allocations before having someone do that for them.

It's a little bit like driving: in the EU you can get a driver's license without ever touching the horse saddle, so you have this huge driver population than can only drive cars.

Which is fine for the general populace, but not if you want to be a jockey, a cowboy or a horseback policeman, which is where the computer science student would fall into the analogy.

People should start with a pile of sand from which they extract pure silicone, then design a cpu with whatever they want. Registers are cool, but you can design a cpu without them if you want. Then the rest of the computer and an Io system (Io is not required, but the instructor needs some way to validate your cpu)

The next step is to design your own language for your cpu, but so far human life isn't long enough.

That was fun, but not entirely wrong.

A decent computer science major will have all of that. In my times we used MIPS though, to reduce the complexity a little bit.

As someone that enjoys learning by building from scratch sure. There's another huge group of us that like diving in and figuring things out as we go.

I too was intro'd with C and ended up coding 2x as much in python cause I just wanted to do stuff without the overhead of low level. I did appreciate my C knowledge when I wanted to do optimizations and better understand my Python code but I definitely think that I could've learned these things in the reverse order.

That's why I started my kids off reading James Joyce. Once they learn to manage their vocabulary and really grasp how grammar is supposed to work, then they can read Dr. Seuss without picking up any bad habits.

Sure my kids are teenagers and have never finished reading a book, but they'll be great authors once they do.

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