I wish someone spoon fed me how to add path for C compilers in Windows back in the day. We lose a good 90% of people to installing C from ever learning C. Feel like godbolt or an online compiler might be a reasonable starting place these days. C is amazing but can be so punishing early on compared to stupid opening up any text editor on earth and writing an HTML file. Not advocating for more JS learning but it's hard to beat the getting started on that.
I always find, whenever I loan Peter Van der Lindens’ “Deep C Secrets: Expert C Programming” book to a fellow colleague, I never get it back. For a while I had 10 or so spare copies to hand out as treats, but now I just refer everyone to this PDF:
And the K&R reference is useful too. It's a small book about a small language that does not have many features and maps to very basic concepts on hardware that really only does very basic things.
I can (it's really obvious here) and wish I couldn't. Every time I run into something I might wanna read, but it turns out to be LLM "assisted" writing after I've already invested some time, it feels like I was tricked into eating cardboard.
And when I bring up that this should be clearly marked, preferably up front, it's often taken as a personal slight.
I realize this is a me problem to some extend, I shouldn't feel strongly about this, but I do.
There are some very small tells, like the constant "rule of threes" that AI loves to follow, but you're right that this is much harder to tell than it used to be.
I wish someone spoon fed me how to add path for C compilers in Windows back in the day. We lose a good 90% of people to installing C from ever learning C. Feel like godbolt or an online compiler might be a reasonable starting place these days. C is amazing but can be so punishing early on compared to stupid opening up any text editor on earth and writing an HTML file. Not advocating for more JS learning but it's hard to beat the getting started on that.
Most Windows users just used Codeblocks C/C++ -or anything similar- and setup everything for them.
I wonder how many hallucinated wrong facts are in there. It looked like a good resource until I learned its LLM generated. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45479268
Wish they had this for zig
Another very fine online reference for someone new to C is Beej's Guide to C Programming: https://beej.us/guide/bgc/
(Here is a reference to K&R, the standard first reference to C, because I am obligated to make such a reference.)
I always find, whenever I loan Peter Van der Lindens’ “Deep C Secrets: Expert C Programming” book to a fellow colleague, I never get it back. For a while I had 10 or so spare copies to hand out as treats, but now I just refer everyone to this PDF:
https://progforperf.github.io/Expert_C_Programming.pdf
If you’re a C programmer, old or new, and haven’t encountered this book: Stop What You Are Doing And Go Read It! It’s amazing.
And the K&R reference is useful too. It's a small book about a small language that does not have many features and maps to very basic concepts on hardware that really only does very basic things.
It's so cool! Do you have a similiar resource about c++?
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45448525
And it's well worth reading this earlier discussion, too.
I wonder why that previous submission was "flagged"?
The HN of 5 months ago was apparently less receptive to anything made involving LLMs than they are today.
Ai is getting really good. I can’t tell the difference anymore.
I can (it's really obvious here) and wish I couldn't. Every time I run into something I might wanna read, but it turns out to be LLM "assisted" writing after I've already invested some time, it feels like I was tricked into eating cardboard.
And when I bring up that this should be clearly marked, preferably up front, it's often taken as a personal slight.
I realize this is a me problem to some extend, I shouldn't feel strongly about this, but I do.
There are some very small tells, like the constant "rule of threes" that AI loves to follow, but you're right that this is much harder to tell than it used to be.