On Tuesday, April 14, 2015 at 1:10:04 PM UTC+5:30, Petter Adsen wrote: > On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 16:36:44 -0500 > David Wright wrote: > > Quoting Petter Adsen wrote: > > > On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 20:21:49 +0300 > > > Reco wrote: > > > > Let's see as I didn't have OS design in mind. Something like: > > > > > > > > Exit codes and their value in real life. > > > > Strings handling, memory allocation. > > > > Process control and daemonisation (sp?). > > > > Signal handling. > > > > Inter-process communication (sockets, pipes). > > > > IP protocol use and abuse. > > > > Shared memory. > > > > Threads. > > > > Libraries and their usage. > > > > > > Just to pipe in here, these are among the things that I want an > > > understanding of - especially numbers 3, 4, 5, 6 and 9. With extra > > > focus on 9 and 6b :) Also things like communication between > > > processes and devices, file systems, etc. I want to learn how to > > > find out why things work the way they do, if that makes sense. > > > > If you want to understand the basics, there is any number of tutorials > > on the web. If you want to play with them, then pick a language and go > > to a web page like https://docs.python.org/3/library/index.html > > and write some toy programs. Most of these facilities have wrappers > > that save you having to write C code to create, say, a couple of > > sockets that talk to each other. If you try this in C and it doesn't > > work, it might take you half a day to decide whether you've > > misunderstood the socket concept or just made a programming error. > > I can understand that. > > > As Reco said, > > > > > > [...], and for the complex program you'll probably want > > > > something else as by today's standards C has poor result/effort > > > > ratio. > > That I can also accept. I see that a lot of people advice me on going > with something other than C, and I can understand that there are good > reasons for this advice. While I still want to learn C at some point, > I'm beginning to think that it might be wise to consider getting a good > foundation in another language first.
In case it helps I saw this | And Rob Hagan at Monash had shown that you could teach students more COBOL | with one semester of Scheme and one semester of COBOL than you could with | three semesters of COBOL. from here https://groups.google.com/d/msg/erlang-programming/5X1irAmLMD8/qCQJ11Y5jEAJ What that is saying is that priming your learning curve is more important than what you learn. And COBOL (like C) is a terrible way to do that And if you still need convincing that C is a painful intro to programming, please read section 4 of http://www.the-magus.in/Publications/chor.pdf Beyond that what you should take up really depends on what calls you: - python is nice if its scripts - something else (haskell?) or maybe something more esoteric like Julia, APL if its mathematical - etc ie choose a language that optimizes an area that primarily calls you > > Would Python be appropriate? I see a lot of software these days that is > written in Python, so it would be helpful in that way. Specifically for linux system-level stuff, python will give you 80-90% of the C level stuff at ⅕ the pain. eg for TCP/IP networking look at https://docs.python.org/2/library/socket.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/5dfc17f1-9797-49b4-b0a2-9c2498353...@googlegroups.com
