I was sure learning C was a waste of time for web stuff

For the first year I only did Python and JavaScript, thinking C was just for old systems. Then I took a course that had us write a basic web server in C from scratch. Seeing how memory gets allocated and how sockets actually work made JavaScript's fetch() API click in a way it never had before. Has anyone else had a language they avoided turn out to be super helpful for understanding the basics?

3 comments

3 Comments

palmer.laura2mo ago

Totally get that, C makes everything else make sense.

maxp6828d ago

Hang on a second. The real value of C isn't just that it teaches you about memory or the machine. Its that it forces you to write code that's brutally honest about what its doing. Every byte you allocate you have to free. Every pointer you use can crash your program if you're sloppy. That kind of discipline carries over to every other language you use afterwards. Languages like Python or Java hide that stuff from you, but C makes you stare at it until you get it right. Thats why learning C is like learning the rules of grammar for a language, then everything else is just an easier dialect.

tarat592mo ago

Used to hate C, found it super clunky and hard to read. Then I had to debug some high-level code that was acting crazy. Tracing it back to how C handles memory showed me the whole machine. Now I see it as the foundation, and everything built on top just clicks better.