Job Posting (.04K Reward!) Jr. Linux Admin + Windows Support

[Levi Pearson]

On Sep 9, 2006, at 8:01 AM, Josh Coates wrote:

>
> ooh - this sounds like an invitation to go off about what a shame  
> it is that
> software engineers aren't being taught or learning system languages  
> like C.
> ;-)
>
> does this freak anyone else out, or is it just me?
>
> i mean, java, perl, python etc are fine languages and i'm sure C#  
> is great
> and all - but holy crap, if you aren't proficient in C, it just  
> seems to me
> that you are 'half' and engineer, and will never reach your full  
> potential
> as a career software developer.
>

I would be very happy to see C and C++ die, but only if a suitable  
replacement for low-level systems programming became much more  
popular and someone wrote POSIX libraries for it.

I don't think there's anything about C that makes someone who doesn't  
know it half an engineer.  I'd  say someone who wrote embedded  
systems code in Ada (for example) would be far more likely to be a  
good software engineer that a random competent C programmer.

If you're not actually writing C code for a job, it's far more  
important to have a concept of what the machine is doing than to know  
C.  Writing C code is but one way to gain a somewhat better knowledge  
of how the machine works.

		--Levi