🚀 go-pugleaf

I came to C from Fortran a few years back; with a Fortran background,
there are two distinct things one needs to master to program
effectively in C.

Firstly, one must master the new programming techniques, such as
linkage classes, scope, pointers, heap memory management, and
recursion.  Secondly, one must master the notation and semantics of the
C language -- C is a very dense and tightly-woven language.

One can attempt to learn both of these concepts simultaneously, by
plunging straight into C, or one can learn the first using Pascal, a
much simpler, smaller, and more limited language than C.  This was the
path I would recommend, with a couple of months with Jensen and Wirth
to learn the new concepts (where new == late 1960s) with Pascal and
then a couple of weeks with Kernighan and Ritchie to learn the C
language per se.

There is so much new stuff in C that I would learn it first and then
C++.

****

Fortran possesses several advantages over C in numerical computing, but
none of them are overwhelming.  There are better and more extensive
libraries available in Fortran (but f2c exists), Fortran compilers on
fast machines generally produce better scalar code than C compilers
(but only by perhaps at most 25%), Fortran has complex numbers
(although these can be added easily to C++), and Fortran code will
often vectorize more easily and with less intervention that C code (but
often even Fortran code needs tweaking or re-writing to take full
advantage).  Still, I work almost exclusively in C because I find I can
write, debug, and understand my programs more quickly and easily, and
still get within 25% of the speed of Fortran.  Your milage may vary.

****

On a separate issue, some people insist on making the age-old assertion
that C is a kind of portable assembly language.  This is simply not
true.

C deals with the kind of objects and operations that many assembly
languages do, but it gives one no information on the REALIZATION of the
language on the machine.  For example, the language does not specify
the format (or even the existence) of the call stack, so it is
impossible to garbage-collect the stack in standard C, just as it is
impossible to do this in, say, standard Pascal.  (Yes, I know one can
do it in both C and Pascal for specific implementations.)  It is true,
however, to say that C (and similar languages, such as BCPL and BLISS)
replaced assembly language in many tasks.