On 01/19/2017 06:46 PM, Evan Koblentz via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
This has been a very educational thread for me.
It sounds like most people agree I should learn C or Pascal. C familiarity would serve me well as a computer historian. Pascal would make me a better (or at least less-sloppy) programmer.
If I try my hand at Pascal, then I know to seek a version of UCSD Pascal for Apple, that's knowledge I picked up as a historian. :)
If I try learning C, then I could go directly to K&R or even pick up a modern Dummies book, but for period's sake it would be the former.
"Modern" vs "period" is irrelevant here. The K&R book (2nd edition...that part IS relevant) is by far the easiest book from which to learn C. Yes, it's decades old, but that doesn't matter. The language is the language. More stuff has been added to the ANSI C standard, even relatively recently, but none of it is anything that's relevant to what you want to do, and it's nearly all stuff that nobody ever uses. C is a very, very tiny language. The key to learning it is to slow down and pay attention. Don't rush through it, or you'll get stuck on pointers, which are just about the simplest concept in all of computing, but people who rush too much and don't pay attention don't wrap their brains around them. And it's a marketable job skill. In these uncertain times, an additional job skill is a good insurance policy. Further, the use of C is growing exponentially with the new focus on simpler, low-power processors in the embedded space. Pascal is a nice language but it's not marketable at all. It's used a bit here and there, but not much. (unfortunately) It's also a much higher-level language than C. That's neither here nor there, but it's something you should (and probably already do) know. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA