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If it wasn't for one irc channel, I don't think I would have made it through the first 2 years of programming. Didn't bother them to much (i hope), but just to understand pointers and that at the start, with C, and other things, really helped. 12 years on and wouldn't wanna do anything else.

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##C on freenode?

For sharpening your axe ##C is amazing, but beginners are regularly mocked and burned at the stake there.

> "How do I allocate a string?"

> "But what is a string?"

> "You know that thing with letters in it. Seriously how do I allocate a string?"

> "Sorry we don't know what a string is, you'll need to define it for us first"

> "OK it's a contiguous chunk of bytes in RAM"

> "Sorry C has no concept of bytes or RAM."

That kind of impractical nonsense.

In C, there is no stack.

##c is perhaps the most infamously caustic active channel on any IRC network today. Fun, if that's what you are into.

I figured it was just one guy who is so awful. It's more than one person?

To be honest I haven't been there for more than a year, but I remember it being a cumulative effect.

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