[LAU] OT: C or C++?

[Philipp Überbacher]

Excerpts from Robin Gareus's message of 2010-10-14 00:32:47 +0200:
> On 10/14/10 00:11, Folderol wrote:
> > On Thu, 14 Oct 2010 00:03:19 +0200
> > fons at kokkinizita.net wrote:
> > 
> >> On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 03:42:46PM -0500, Josh Lawrence wrote:
> >>
> >>> Sparing you a lot of useless back story here, but for fun a for
> >>> personal amusement (NOT for serious work), I'd like to start learning
> >>> a programming language.  If I'm gonna learn one, I might as well learn
> >>> something that gets a lot of use in the open-source world.  So which
> >>> one to choose?  C or C++?
> >>
> >> First learn C. Make sure you go to the bottom of it.
> >> Then learn C++, and select what's useful for you and what isn't.
> 
> I concur. Start with C.
> 
> a rule of thumb: for GUIs and complex structures: C++ ;for algorithms: C
> 
> Apart from some book, the 'manpages-dev' package (section 3 manual
> pages) come in really handy. eg `man 3 printf` gives you a full overview
> and even example code.
> 
> After you grasped some basics, reading other PPL's code is something
> that helps a lot.
> 
> I've started some small off-list online tutoring; walking through
> JACKd's simple_client.c and Fons's jnoise source with Philipp
> Ueberbacher recently and can post our conversation if you're interested.
> 
> >> Ciao,
> >>
> > Glad to know I made the right decision!
> > 
> > // Still prevaricating with pointers and struggling with structures :(
> 
> I recently recommended this one to Philipp:
>   http://cslibrary.stanford.edu/102/PointersAndMemory.pdf
> 
> It's an nice read and I especially like the first sentence:
> 
> "There's a lot of nice, tidy code you can write without knowing about
> pointers. But once you learn to use the power of pointers, you can never
> go back."
> 
> best,
> robin

And I really appreciate this :)
Sadly I have had little time at my hands so far, it will hopefully get
better this weekend.

To the original poster:
I can't tell what's the best way to start. I'm interested in C because
it's practically needed for audio processing and because it's the
predecessor of many common languages. Also, C is a good match with lua,
which is a scripting language that I really like and dabble with from
time to time. But besides that I have to learn Java for university,
whether I like it or not :)

All I can really tell so far is that for a small set of things a certain
kind of language is required, for everything else it seems to be very
much a matter of preference.

Regards,
Philipp