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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

The title is correct, but I very much doubt that most new C++ programmers (or anyone starting their programming carrier after ca 2005) started with C and the "C++ is just C with classes" mindset. You don't need to know C to have ample opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot for the first few decades of writing C++ code, and the C language really cannot be blamed for any problems that C++ stacked on top of C.

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I believe lots of courses still teach C-esque C++ first, starting with "three kinds of memory: stack, heap, global", then adding classes, followed by templates, and finally getting into STL.

Here is an example MIT course from 2011, it introduces C-style arrays and C-style strings in lecture 4, pointers in lecture 5, and classes in lecture 6: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-096-introduction-to-c-january-... (although memory management is postponed)

Another MIT course from 2014 explicitly starts with C, but it has "C and C++" in its name: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-s096-effective-programming-in-...

Well, I started on the Mac (Metrowerks) and Visual C++ 1.0, and at that time you still had to interoperate with either Windows or Mac "pseudo-classes" (even down to having to set Pascal stack calling conventions, etc.).

Surviving that (and the ample choice of exquisitely carved tribal foot guns on either OS) was an interesting experience.

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