Laurie White’s Blog

Crap.  It looks like I know C.  Or at least a little of it.  Enough of it to contribute to Open Source.

I’m in the Just Enough C for Open Source session.  It is well presented and interesting to see how the old ideas are being presented to the new age of programmers (“Oh no, variables aren’t automatically initialized!”), but I’m not getting much new out of it.

Which is disappointing for me.  I decided a long damn time ago not to learn C.  I knew Basic and Fortran and Cobol and Lisp and Pascal and Modula-2 and Ada and at the time, that seemed like enough.  And I wasn’t using C for anything, so it seemed like too much to add another language to the mix.

And the C/Unix guys were just annoying.  I’d ask them how to do something simple and be told to do something difficult instead.  Why bother?

Of course, in the intervening years, I’ve learned another language or two (or 20, but I don’t feel like worrying about that now), but still avoided C.  I still had no reason to learn it.  I did learn C++ and Java, which are sorta close!

But, osmosis happens.  Sitting through this session, it appears I’ve learned C.

I had a friend in college studying comparative languages who decided never to read Hamlet.  I got where he was coming from.  I wonder if he was as disappointed when he realized he knew who Yorick was as I am now.