[sdiy] Programming Language Recommendation

[Brian Willoughby]

You definitely won't be wasting your time by learning C.

If you look deep enough, you'll see that all the other languages end up relying on C for the bottom layer that glues the language to the system it's running on. A lot of languages like C# or Python are too inefficient to deal with high-bandwidth hardware interfacing without dropping data, so there will be an interface library to handle the hardware - and that library is written in C. You may never need to deal with these libraries, but the standard C underpinnings are there, nonetheless.

Also note that C++ and Objective C are built on top of standard C. They're literally extensions of C, so everything you learn about C will be 100% applicable to C++ or ObjC. C++ is a different compiler. Objective C was originally just a pre-processor that sent its output to the standard C compiler, so by definition ObjC is compatible with C.

Granted, a lot of the other languages are merely "C like" and have nothing in common with the C compiler. These are syntactically similar, but not literally compatible.

Brian


On Dec 4, 2020, at 10:51, Shawn Rakestraw <shawnrakestraw at gmail.com> wrote:
> I know I need to start at the beginning with the absolute basics. What I do not want to do is spend time learning C and then find out I should have been learning Java, Python, C#, or something else (essentially just wasting my time). I think I know the direction I should head in now.