[Please forgive my top posting.]

I think C is not taught as much in universities these days because the
emphasis is on languages with native object orientation.  C# is, indeed,
good for vocational reasons, but many also consider it worth teaching as
a language with a superior design than Java, which, in turn, is superior
to C++.  These languages naturally learned from their predecessors and
improved on them in significant ways.

I agree that it would be beneficial to Ruby development if I already
knew C.  I did not study computer science in college, however, and have
picked up higher level languages as my interest in programming grew.
Technically, C may not be strongly typed, but it does require variable
declarations, memory management, etc., which is the kind of low-level
programming I want to avoid.  At this point, I think I can contribute
more by application development with Ruby than by learning C to improve
the language, itself.

Regards,
Jamal

-----Original Message-----
From: James Britt [mailto:james.britt / gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, July 14, 2006 1:13 PM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: Re: How to speed up ruby and make it as fast as possible


...

C was taught at my college as part of a general program related to 
operating systems.  It was the second programming language I learned, 
and while I do no C coding now, being able to read C is very helpful if 
you want to understand Ruby mechanics.   This can help you write faster 
Ruby code.

The reasons for, and value of, learning C have nothing to do with what 
goes on at universities; I would think that the rise in emphasis on Java

and .Net would suggest that many schools are more interested in 
vocational training than computer science education.

I understand why someone might not want to learn C and why they would 
prefer to do all coding in Ruby or some other language that offers 
higher abstractions.   On the other hand, one should maybe know at least

enough about C so as not to mistakenly call it a strongly-typed
language.

I Rite, like Ruby, is written in C, so one way or another C will make 
Ruby faster.  Who actually writes that C code is another matter.  Maybe 
that's another reason to learn C: to help with Rite.


-- 
James Britt

"I was born not knowing and have had only a little
  time to change that here and there."
  - Richard P. Feynman