
In Defense of Learning Code the Hard Way - rvern
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/in-defense-of-learning-code-the-hard-way
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richerlariviere
The moment I understood pointers, It felt like you discovered an entire world,
tied by logic, pure as crystal. Learning C++ helped me a lot to understand
oriented object programming and manual memory managing. Now, I am a web
developer doing some JavaScript.

I think the weakest point of JavaScript online programming courses is the lack
of algorithms. You end up to do a lot of DOM manipulations, apply some CSS and
that's it you are ready to get a job. But you don't really know how to
translate your mental concepts into code.

~~~
DyslexicAtheist
I love the new languages like Go, Rust, Clojure, Node, ... but learning C on
Unix has taught me more about computers than any of the (new) stuff I picked
up in the past 10 years combined.

Debugging with gdb, strace, valgrind, lsof, ... and learning about low level
system calls will teach you a great deal about how a program works, where it’s
resources are used and how to eliminate it’s bottlenecks. What is a heap,
stack or static memory? How does memory management or garbage-collection work
on a modern OS? What is IPC and how do the individual system calls function &
require as input? ...

