Is it worth learning C now?

[brackett]

Sure - like I said, I exaggerate a bit. There's a lot of existing investment in C++ codebases, and that stuff has to be maintained and extended. For new development though, I don't see the benefit. Some folks will howl and cry about the large size of managed frameworks, and the "performance hit" of garbage collected languages - but I think most of that is C++ coders protecting turf.

As for business development, there's no contest. VB used to be the king of business development because it'd take you 1/4 the time to develop it vs. C++. Of course, you paid for that with increased maintenance costs because of a limited language. Now, with .NET (or Java), you can have the speed of development of VB, with a language as powerful as C++....what's not to like?

Of course, I think C/C++ is still worth knowing, as it'll make you understand what higher level languages like Java/C# are doing for you. That way, you'll never want to go back.

[WingedPanther]

Originally Posted by Jordan

I wouldn't waste much time learning C. If you learn C++ you also learn C. C++ is the better language.

I can only half agree with Jordan. I wouldn't waste time learning C. However, if you learn C++ you will not learn C, unless you are using a book that teaches you to do everything the "C way" instead of the "C++ way".

For example:

#include "stdio.h"
void main(){
  printf("Hello world.\n");
}

Is your most basic C program.

#include <iostream>
int main(){
  std::cout << "Hello world.\n";
  return 0;
}

is your most basic C++ program. If you learn C++, you will be able to pick up C quite easily, but you are definitely not learning C. Moreover, C++ accomodates some very different approaches to thinking about problems from C. Once you learn C++, C will feel very restrictive.

[DevilsCharm]

C does look a lot different than C++. You're right, I can see how learning one would make it easier to learn the other, but you definately couldn't program in the other straight away just cause you know one.

[bernkly]

Originally Posted by MrDiaz

hmm not quite my friends. C is still a major language, and the difference is that is a low level programming language. It works pretty much as assembly, directly with the processor.

Why do you think Operating Systems are written using C and not other language. Using C you get to control more the memory management of your operating systems as well as more directly the flow of your application. There are many things why you should learn C is that what you really are aiming for.

So it depends on what your goal is and where you're heading at in your professional life.

Hope that helps,

Yes, agreed with you.

I meet a project manager that code program for credit card system for banking industry long before and he was using C to wrote such program since it can subtitute assembly language at the same time minimise the program size.

C language was still used by network administrator til nowdays.

Anyway, just learned the basic of C and C++ and move on to other programming languages. It will be useful later.

[Steve.L]

Whether C or C++ are useful in terms of what you can easily do with them is irrelevant. The fact is, many companies out there are based on C or C++, and you MUST know the language or you will simply not be hired, period. Yes, I agree that they are monsters, but you're definitely better off learning them. Plus you really get hands-on experience at a low-level of programming, and unless you start whipping out code in ASM, you probably won't get much lower. And for the person who claimed Java was as powerful as C/C++, well... I'm just going to leave it at that.

As for the C/C++ debate on which one to learn, definitely learn C++, because you will also learn a lot of C in the process, due to the fact that they are, obviously, very similar languages. Also, definitely learn Java if you do not already. After that, you pretty much have to pick and choose which language(s) to learn based on relevance to your career/hobby goals.

[dcs]

Originally Posted by effiesha

true. C++ is much better than C.

I hope you're not replying to every 2-year-old thread and saying little if anything.

[adrix.m]

Definitely yes.

C is the low level language of choice for embedded systems, operating systems, real time operating systems, and a big selection of applications which live in the *X software ecosystem.

Also, be aware that C and C++ are not the same language: non-toy applications will be very different from every aspect, from req analysis/design specification to implementation/debugging/maintenance if built in C
(procedure oriented) or C++ (OO). It is also possible to program good OO stuff in C, but the language does not help very much, API-oriented interfaces are much more common.

Naturally, if the application ecosystem is desktop applications, web development, networking, you name it, C/C++ can be not the right choice or the bad one as well.

[Aereshaa]

C is the lingua franca of the /*n?x/ environment. That means when writing programs for those systems, you will usually either be writing in C or in a language derived from C i.e any of these:
C, C++, Awk, sh, csh, Perl, Ruby, Python, Java, tcsh, Objective-C, ECMAscript, PHP...
The list goes on. Most programming languages in common use derive in one way or another from C, so it can be helpful to know it, kind of like knowing Latin when learning Spanish or French.

[outsid3r]

C++ is more powerfull than C, but C for me is some kind of magic language, i really like it. Learning C is trully not a waste of time in my opinion, it's great because you will need to pay more atention in programming in C than most of other languages because is less type-safer, and also it's a different programming filosofy, in C you will use procedimental programming filosofy instead of OOP filosofy. You will program with a less abstract language. Definitly it's good learning C at start. Then you jump to other more high level languages you will undestand them better.

[Prototype]

Is C++ the best language out right now?