Rant: I thought learning C first was a waste of time, but my professor made us do it anyway.

He said it builds a better mental model for how computers actually work, and after struggling with pointers for two weeks, something clicked. Now when I use Python, I actually understand what's happening under the hood. Do you think beginners should start with a harder language like C, or go straight to something easier?

3 comments

3 Comments

alex_nguyen1mo ago

Oh so now we're all supposed to suffer through pointers to earn our programmer stripes? Guess I'll tell my car mechanic he needs to forge his own wrenches first. That C struggle does wire your brain differently though, like finally seeing the matrix after staring at raw memory addresses. Starting with the easy stuff just means you hit the confusing walls later when your code gets slow for no obvious reason.

hill.andrew27d ago

that pointer struggle is real" - yeah, my buddy Dave had that exact moment. He was a comp sci major who HATED his C class, complained every single day about memory management and segfaults. Then he got a summer internship doing web dev in JavaScript. First week his boss asked him to fix a memory leak in their Node app, and Dave just stared at it, completely lost for like three days. He called me in a panic because he couldn't even figure out where to start looking. It wasn't until he went back to his C textbook and realized he already KNEW the whole garbage collection concept from dealing with malloc and free. He said it was like having a cheat code for understanding why higher level code breaks. Now he tells every new developer to suffer through C pointers first, just for that one moment where something finally clicks.

margaret_jackson731mo ago

Started with C myself back in the day. That pointer grind is real, but it sticks with you. I'd tell any beginner to tough it out for a semester. You'll debug higher level code way faster knowing what the heap actually is.