Comment by Timothy Gu on "What languages do you think should colleges teach in their undergraduate computer science courses?"

Computer science is different from computer programming. If the sole reason you are attending college is to find a job as a system programmer, then yes, C is a must. But, if you are learning computer science, then C is an incredibly bad choice.

See, computers and humans are alike. You can be a great mathematician, and understand calculus, but be illiterate. It can be difficult to learn calculus, when, without a notation, it is hard to communicate between two people. But Newton and Leibniz never had a calculus notation before them, and they still invented calculus. To become an accountant OTOH, you need to understand "+" means addition, and "-" means subtraction.

To be good at computer science, you merely need to know how computer works, and algorithms for problem solving. You don't even need to learn one programming language (in fact, many university CS classes in the US are language-agnostic), although knowing a programming language that's easy to learn helps communication. But to become a programmer, you need to know a language that you are going to use daily on your job, which might be C. There's no point to using a language that's hard to learn, when its only purpose is communication.

Now, as to what languages are easy to learn, personally I think Python is a good language. It doesn't have too many low-level things like pointers, and it maps fairly well to mathematical notation. Following the same thought, MATLAB/GNU Octave is another useful language for computer science.

While I think you are probably right on the whole, the flip side of the argument is that C pointers teach and show an understanding of addressable memory. Also a fair number on languages are C-like or C-based, so to transition to some other languages might be easier. I personally found learning C in my CS degree helpful and informative, but that is just my opinion.

@nickwiersma yes but as a beginner you just want to see hello world and not want to think how the memory of the callstack points to the heap and so on ... C is a really good and important language but for beginners a script language is so much easier to grasp.

@j Completely understand and appreciate your point of view, although hello world in C usually doesn't involve memory allocations and callstacks (unless you were hello worlding in inline asm :) ). I understand every point of view that is opposed to C in a degree structure. I have however worked in many companies, with many different developers and I found that those that learned C as a degree (read starting) language had a better understanding of what was happening under the hood, then those that starting on "simpler" languages. So i suppose my experiences would always lead me down the Yaya for C road.

@nickwiersma, I do agree with your thinking, that it can be helpful to know what is going on behind the scenes (in fact, the first language I learned was C, and I can feel the benefit of doing so). However, you don't need to know C to find the time complexity of a function, for example. That goes back to my distinction between CS and more applied studies like electronic engineering, as low-level programming is a very important part of EE, but less so for pure CS studies. And oh, I sure hope you are not using malloc() for a simple hello world program in asm :)

@nick yes i agree, but i started with borland C. :D I don't prefer any language any more at least since my reading about building compilers and language synthesis. but i agree having worked with a low level language allows you to understand at least some basics of memory and processings :D

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