how relevant is C today?

[Carl Friedrich Bolz]

Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2006-04-08, Martin v. Löwis <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
> 
>>As for *learning* the languages: never learn a language
>>without a specific inducement.
> 
> That's silly.  Learning (weather a computer language, a natural
> language, or anything else) is never a bad thing.  The more
> languages you know, the more you understand about languages in
> general.  Learning languages is like any other skill: the more
> you do it, the better you get at it.

I don't exactly see why this is a contradiction. "Specific inducement" 
does not necessarily mean that you have to have an external cause to 
learn a language -- be it your job or whatever. Nobody hinders you from 
creating that inducement yourself. It's just very hard to properly learn 
a language without having an idea what to do with it (in fact, I have 
seen people interested to learn programming utterly fail in doing so 
because they had absolutely no clue what to program).

>>If you know you are going to write a Python extension, an
>>Apache module, or a Linux kernel module in the near future,
>>start learning C today. If you don't know what you want to use
>>it for, learning it might be a waste of time, as you won't
>>know what to look for if you don't have a specific project in
>>mind.
> 
> Geeze, when I think of all the things I've "wasted my time"
> learning.

Well, how many languages have you learnt without writing anything in them?

Cheers,

Carl Friedrich Bolz