You don't need to know C, just like you don't need to know how your car's engine works […] will eventually be useful, when you inevitably need to read some old piece of code […]
This is an analogy I hear rather often, but I think it does miss a vital point.
It doesn't just help you when something does inevitably break.
The analogy I'd much prefer to hear from people is something along the lines of "when you know how your car's engine works, you might have a better understanding of the general handling of the car, for example if you knew what the oil in the motor was for exactly, would you care more or less about it?".
I haven't quite found the perfect words for such an analogy though.
What I mean is though, that having the basic understanding does often prevent issues before they arise, and they sometimes can be used to save hell of a lot of work even when no incident as such is involved at all.
Just a small complement to what you wrote, I agree to what you said either way.
After rereading the comment; yes, correct, however you're implying that some change is made or some code is read, which doesn't even need to be the case in my experience.
Often it's just useful to know how memory works (and why adding a character in the middle of a string is so terribly complex (or terribly expensive if you're lazy), even if it's not part of some C code at all.
The mindset of string manipulation in C is inherent to every language I know, but C is the only language that makes it painstakingly apparent as to why you can't just move half the string one byte further in memory to insert another character.
C's pointers also make it super easy to understand rope libraries, because it all boils down to "don't move, just store three pointers in a list¹ instead".
Basically knowing C isn't a requirement for any other programming language, but it gives you a natural understanding of some very hard problems, and how to solve them, no matter what language or runtime.
¹: one of the reasons why C is so terribly annoying in every-day use, and the reason I don't use it every day, is the absence of built-in and well supported collections, though there is some library/header file which does have collections (maps, sets, lists, double ended queues, etc.) implemented with a few macros, I am just unable to ever recall which library it was ;-;
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This is an analogy I hear rather often, but I think it does miss a vital point.
It doesn't just help you when something does inevitably break.
The analogy I'd much prefer to hear from people is something along the lines of "when you know how your car's engine works, you might have a better understanding of the general handling of the car, for example if you knew what the oil in the motor was for exactly, would you care more or less about it?".
I haven't quite found the perfect words for such an analogy though.
What I mean is though, that having the basic understanding does often prevent issues before they arise, and they sometimes can be used to save hell of a lot of work even when no incident as such is involved at all.
Just a small complement to what you wrote, I agree to what you said either way.
In my defense, you'll notice that I never referred to things breaking. You hit the nail on the head as to why: It's just not that simple.
After rereading the comment; yes, correct, however you're implying that some change is made or some code is read, which doesn't even need to be the case in my experience.
Often it's just useful to know how memory works (and why adding a character in the middle of a string is so terribly complex (or terribly expensive if you're lazy), even if it's not part of some C code at all.
The mindset of string manipulation in C is inherent to every language I know, but C is the only language that makes it painstakingly apparent as to why you can't just move half the string one byte further in memory to insert another character.
C's pointers also make it super easy to understand rope libraries, because it all boils down to "don't move, just store three pointers in a list¹ instead".
Basically knowing C isn't a requirement for any other programming language, but it gives you a natural understanding of some very hard problems, and how to solve them, no matter what language or runtime.
¹: one of the reasons why C is so terribly annoying in every-day use, and the reason I don't use it every day, is the absence of built-in and well supported collections, though there is some library/header file which does have collections (maps, sets, lists, double ended queues, etc.) implemented with a few macros, I am just unable to ever recall which library it was ;-;