Tech ain't that deep - and that's a problem | deadSimpleTech
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With that in mind, it became fairly clear to me that the tech industry these days has a depth problem: as much as tech is becoming quite a bit more complex, it's also becoming shallower. Learning new things in tech these days, as often as not, simply doesn't give me the same feeling of satisfaction or achievement as learning or writing C back in the first years of my career did. Being effective in tech these days feels as though it's less about understanding than it is about memorising a big list of buzzwords and all of the catches associated with them. And while LLMs have certainly pushed this into overdrive, the issue has existed, in one form or another, for quite a while now.

Why is learning C so much more generally useful than learning React? What I mean by the last point is that learning C tends to develop skills that are useful in a lot of other parts of software and tech work: if you know how to write decent C, you’ll have a much easier time of understanding PostgreSQL internals, for example, while if you’ve learned React, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether or not that’ll actually improve your HTML skills, for example.

  • apparia@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    Great article. I’ve always been of the opinion that C should be one of, if not the, first things taught to programmers. You can explain Python in terms of C, but you can’t explain C in terms of Python.

      • apparia@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        01·
        2 months ago

        From the perspective of this thread they’re probably similarly good and “deep”. My instinct would be to err away from anything object oriented for beginners since OOP has always felt a little cultish to me and I think it’s maybe something “shallow” (at least shallower than plain C) that has a habit of masquerading as the one true “deep” way to do programming.

        C also has the practical advantage of being fucking everywhere.

        Rust

        I like Rust, but beyond the subset that is “ugly C” – using unsafe everywhere and eschewing like 90% of std – it’s definitely shallow.

  • trem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    1·
    2 months ago

    if you know how to write decent C, you’ll have a much easier time of understanding PostgreSQL internals, for example, while if you’ve learned React, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether or not that’ll actually improve your HTML skills, for example.

    I mean, there’s also a much more mundane reason why C comes up more often: It doesn’t use a runtime environment, so a library written in C can be called from virtually any programming language.

    For the longest time, if you wanted to write a cross-language library, C and C++ were pretty much your only choices.
    Rust is now entering that circle and I do think, it will start showing up in lots of places, too.

    But perhaps another reason why mastering C is more educational than mastering other languages, including Rust: C hardly abstracts from how the hardware works, so you’re not just mastering C, you’re also mastering hardware.

    Other programming languages ultimately get executed on that same hardware as well, even if lots of abstraction layers are in between, so that knowledge still keeps being relevant every so often.