Should I learn C before learning C

Question

I visited a university CS department open day today and in the labs tour we sat down to play with a couple of final-year projects from undergraduate students  One was particularly good - a sort of FPS asteroids game  I decided to take a peek in the src directory to find it was done in C    most of the other projects were Java 3D apps    I haven t done any C before but I have looked through some C code before  From what I saw in the  cpp code in this game it didn t look very different   I m interested in learning either C or C   but will probably learn the other later on  Is there any advantage to me learning one before the other and if so  which one

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Having observed people  who have learned Java first  struggle with the concepts of pointers and memory management in C    I d say that learning C first is a good idea  in order to grasp these two concepts  isolated from the complexities of other C   features

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Learning C forces you to think harder about some issues such as explicit and implicit memory management or storage sizes of basic data types at the time you write your code   Once you have reached a point where you feel comfortable around C s features and misfeatures  you will probably have less trouble learning and writing in C     It is entirely possible that the C   code you have seen did not look much different from standard C  but that may well be because it was not object oriented and did not use exceptions  object-orientation  templates or other advanced features

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I m going to disagree with the majority here   I think you should learn C before learning C     It s definitely not necessary  but I think it makes learning C   a lot easier   C is at the heart of C     Anything you learn about C is applicable to C    but C is a lot smaller and easier to learn     Pick up K amp R and read through that   It is short and will give you a sufficient sense of the language   Once you have the basics of pointers and function calls down  you can move on to C   a little easier

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I learned C first  and I took a course in data structures which used C  before I learned C     This has worked well for me   A data structures course in C gave me a solid understanding of pointers and memory management   It also made obvious the benefits of the object oriented paradigm  once I had learned what it was     On the flip side  by learning C first  I have developed some habits that initially caused me to write bad C   code  such as excessive use of pointers  when C   references would do  and the preprocessor   C   is really a very complex language with lots of features   It is not really a superset of C  though  Rather there is a subset of C   consisting of the basic procedural programming constructs  loops  ifs  and functions   which is very similar to C   In your case  I would start with that  and then work my way up to more advanced concepts like classes and templates   The most important thing  IMHO  is to be exposed to different programming paradigms  like procedural  object-oriented  functional  and logical  early on  before your brain freezes into one way of looking at the world   Incidentally  I would also strongly recommend that you learn a functional programming language  like Scheme   It would really expand your horizons

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If you decide to learn both  and as other people have mentioned  there s no explicit need to learn both   learn C first  Going from C to C   feels like a natural progression  going the other way feels like deliberately tying one hand behind your back   -

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I love this question - it s like asking  what should I learn first  snowboarding or skiing    I think it depends if you want to snowboard or to ski  If you want to do both  you have to learn both   In both sports  you slide down a hill on snow using devices that are sufficiently similar to provoke this question  However  they are also sufficiently different so that learning one does not help you much with the other  Same thing with C and C    While they appear to be languages sufficiently similar in syntax  the mind set that you need for writing OO code vs procedural code is sufficiently different so that you pretty much have to start from the beginning  whatever language you learn second

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In the process of learning C   you will learn most of C as well  But keep in mind a lot of C   code is not valid C  C   was designed to be compatible with C code  so i d say learn C   first  Brian wrote a great answer regarding this

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There is no need to learn C before learning C       They are different languages   It is a common misconception that C   is in some way dependent on C and not a fully specified language on its own    Just because C   shares a lot of the same syntax and a lot of the same semantics  does not mean you need to learn C first      If you learn C   you will eventually learn most of C with some differences between the languages that you will learn over time   In fact its a very hard thing to write proper C   because intermediate C   programmers tend to write C C   That is true whether or not you started with C or started with C     If you know C first  then that is good plus to learning C     You will start with knowing a chunk of the language   If you do not know C first then there is no point focusing on a different language   There are plenty of good books and tutorials available that start you from knowing nothing and will cover anything you would learn from C which applies to C   as well    Please see further reasoning in this answer

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Like the answers to many other questions in life  it depends   It depends on what your programming interests and goals are   If you want to program desktop applications  perhaps with a GUI  then C    and OOP  is probably a better way to go   If you re interested in hardware programming on something other than an x86 chipset  then C is often a better choice  usually for its speed   If you want to create a new media player or write a business app  I d choose C     If you want to do scientific simulations of galaxy collisions or fluid dynamics  behold the power of C

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My two cents   I suggest to learn C first  because     it is a fundamental language - a lot of languages descended from C more platforms supports C compiler than C   - be it embedded systems  GPU chips  etc  according to TIOBE index C is still about 2 times more popular than C

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I think you should learn C first  because I learned C first   C gave me a good grasp of the syntax and gotchas with things like pointers  all of which flow into C     I think C   makes it easy to wrap up all those gotchas  need an array that won t overflow when you use the    operator and a dodgy index   Sure  make an array class that does bounds checking  but you need to know what they are and get bitten by them before you understand why things are done in certain ways   When all is said and done  the way C   is usually taught is  C   is C with objects  here s the C stuff and here s how all this OO stuff works   so you re likely to learn basic C before any real C   if you follow most texts anyway

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I think learning C first is a good idea   There s a reason comp sci courses still use C   In my opinion its to avoid all the  crowding  of the subject matter the obligation to require OOP carries   I think that procedural programming is the most natural way to first learn programming   I think that s true because at the end of the day its what you have   lines of code executing one after the other   Many texts today are pushing an  objects first  approach and start talking about cars and gearshifts before they introduce arrays

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No   It s generally more useful to learn C   because it s closer to the most modern OO-based languages  like Eiffel or C    If your goal is to learn C    learn modern  standard C   in the first place  Leave the mallocs aside     But Steve Rowe has a point

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i think c is a really nice programming language  it s compact and somewhat easy to learn  but if you only want to learn c   start with c    but i suggest you to learn both  and if you want to do that  i think it s better to start with c  as said before  it s small and somewhat easy to learn  might be a nice step-up to a more complex programming language as c     since c provides you with some basics   good luck

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