Linked by MOS6510 on Thu 10th Jan 2013 23:25 UTC
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"He's talking about very experienced programmers (which he is).
On my world such type of developers should have no problems understanding languages more complex than C. " No. Not when there's a VM or an interpreter involved, not to the point of knowing what assembly (not just bytecode !) gets generated. Even with a language deeply rooted in C like C++, there are so many parts of it that keeping them all in your mind while you code casually is not possible.
Again, we're not talking about just understanding the language you code in, but understanding what will actually get executed on the CPU.
I know my chosen languages very well, better than I know C. But I still have a better understanding of what C does to my machine than I do with any other language.




Member since:
2006-02-24
C is much simpler to understand fully than most other languages, in the sense that you understand exactly what a given line of code does. You pretty much know what (unoptimized) assembly will be generated by reading C. Try that with python, java, or even C++.
Of course C is harder to understand when you start with the language, but that's not what the author is talking about. He's talking about very experienced programmers (which he is).
In what universe?
In the universe where java is not a "comparable language" I suppose, but I admit I wonder about this one too.