Sr. Software Engineer at CallRail building microservices to support 3rd party integrations. PhD student at the University of Nebraska studying bioinformatics, machine learning, and algorithms.
New programmers should not learn C/C++ unless they want to. I recently wrote about this very topic here . There's nothing inherently wrong with learning C/C++, and you should 1000% learn it if you want to, the problem is with the community of developers telling newbies that they must learn C/C++ or the they're not real programmers because of made up reasons.
For example, I saw an answer on Quora once saying you're not a "real" programmer unless you understand the following code: and the code was a very long pi calculator formatted to look like the pi symbol. Who does that help? Furthermore, just about every sentence in a book like "Learn C The Hard Way" is condescending about C in the context of other programming languages with the background noise of "you're not a real programmer until you've mastered this language."
Telling people they must learn C/C++ as their first or second has become a form of gatekeeping, or at least cookie-cutter go-to advice that people give without thinking. In fact, I think most of the people telling newbies that "learning C will make you a better overall programmer" don't even know the language themselves, or have not been programming for very long.
I agree with this. I had written a few words about gatekeeping specifically, but eventually discarded most of my post because I didn't want to derail the thread. Such attitudes turn people away from the community. It is not wise, even if they are CS students.
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New programmers should not learn C/C++ unless they want to. I recently wrote about this very topic here . There's nothing inherently wrong with learning C/C++, and you should 1000% learn it if you want to, the problem is with the community of developers telling newbies that they must learn C/C++ or the they're not real programmers because of made up reasons.
For example, I saw an answer on Quora once saying you're not a "real" programmer unless you understand the following code: and the code was a very long pi calculator formatted to look like the pi symbol. Who does that help? Furthermore, just about every sentence in a book like "Learn C The Hard Way" is condescending about C in the context of other programming languages with the background noise of "you're not a real programmer until you've mastered this language."
Telling people they must learn C/C++ as their first or second has become a form of gatekeeping, or at least cookie-cutter go-to advice that people give without thinking. In fact, I think most of the people telling newbies that "learning C will make you a better overall programmer" don't even know the language themselves, or have not been programming for very long.
I agree with this. I had written a few words about gatekeeping specifically, but eventually discarded most of my post because I didn't want to derail the thread. Such attitudes turn people away from the community. It is not wise, even if they are CS students.