[Cialug] Learning the 'C' language

[Chris Hilton]

I have a greater concern with bureacracy like telling people to make projects 
more open than they desire to make them.  
FOSS projects are as they are, and trying to change them without being already 
intimate with them isn't advised.
I don't think you're trying to do this.  I'm sure you're just frustrated with 
the number of projects doing the same thing.  But I don't think you should 
be.  It happens, and they do compete:  No one ever said FOSS was effective as 
socialism.

The wheel is bound to get reinvented a thousand times, and it's not always 
bad.  We just don't want 4 kinds of wheels sitting on our desktop, and 4 
different makers of the same kind of wheel!

He needs to understand programming to be as effective as possible in helping 
projects (afterall, politicians and evangelists just make us look like 
religous lawyers).  There's always need for more coders, especially coders 
who are willing to fix documentation!


I'd be happy to help you out with learning C Nathan, it's a good starting 
language if you haven't programmed before (contrary to popular fad belief).  
If you want to learn to code on PC hardware, you might as well learn the 
language which it's all based to work on anyway...  Then learn a language you 
prefer to use.

Learning to code in C is a long process (so is learning to code period).  
Learning the basics of C is an hour lecture; it's an incredibly simple 
language with a tiny standard library (read: pathetic).

There are probably hundreds of introductory tutorials online.  And then the 
book suggested earlier should help as a good reference and guide to using 
what you know.

C will die with Unix ;).  I.E., in a really long time.  And for now, it's a 
great way to learn to code. 


On Wednesday 12 October 2005 02:07 pm, Josh More wrote:
> You bring up some very fine points.  And I fully agree with most of
> them.
>
> My main concern is that there are a lot of similar projects out there
> because
> the original project was poorly designed and/or commented.  I would like
> to
> see people put more time into making projects more open.  'Open' in this
>
> case means 'accepting of contributions from others'.  I am very
> concerned
> about the You must know _____ meritocracy that I see in the open source
> communities.  I worry that if we keep up this semi-hostile attitude that
> the
> open source movement will start losing momentum.
>
> With regards to your point of discouraging it, I wholeheartedly agree.
> I was not trying to discourage the desire to learn C.  I just think that
>
> Nate has skills that he could use that would impact projects much more
> strongly than just adding another programmer.
>
> To my mind, it's like a CEO learning about cows so that he can go flip
> burgers at McDonald's.  (Exaggerated for effect.)

-- 
"The only winning move is not to play."