Diving Into C Lang

Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday’s code." ~ Dan Salomon

After spending the last quarter getting into the C language and building a few little projects with it, I thought it'd be good to capture my initial thoughts with learning and using it.

This was a great use of time overall! I can more confidently look over C projects and understand what the code is doing. Using software such as [Suckless'](https://suckless.org/) `dwm` or `st` projects is not intimidating anymore.

Modding some C header files? Got it! Patching the code? Easy peasy! Make compiling? Psssh, that's nothin...oh my gowsh I didn't read that patch diff closely enough and it messed everything up. 🥲🥹

I do spent a LOT more time writing C programs than any other language, partially due to my newbie-ness at it, but also it is just a lot more manual in many aspects. The biggest gripe I had was a lack of dependencies manager and tooling like many modern languages come equipped with (hi `cargo`!).

I started my programming journey with Ruby, switching quickly after to Python, and now I wish I'd been able to start with C, as it would have given me a better foundation to grow from. Caveat is that starting with C would only be advised if it were part of university course, MOOC, or group study effort where there would be experienced programmers who could offer guidance on some of the trickier bits along the way.

This next quarter we'll be diving deeper into Systems Architecture and back to our regularly scheduled Rust work. Onward!!

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