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Josh Lawrence wrote:
> hi Erik, I'm glad you asked this question...I've always felt like a

quoted text
> sub-par Linux user because I could not program.  I've also noticed

> that a lot of programs I've run across in my limited experience with

> Linux are written in C.  therefore, learning C could only help my

> understanding of my computer.

This is an interesting point. Yes, the vast majority of the small

useful utilities that run on a Linux machine have historically

been written in C. In addition, OS kernels, device drivers and

speed critical tasks are usually written in C. That means that

any professional programmer or dilligent amateur programmer

should know C.
However, for the small user space utilities, C is not the only

game in town. As part of my day job I ocassionally write similar

small utilities to run on our kiosk style linux systems. However,

I rarely write these utilities in C; C is way too flawed and

unsafe a language.
Instead, I write these utilities in strict statically typed

functional languages like Ocaml and (more recently) Haskell.

These languages are higher level so I don't have to worry about

things like memory allocation and buffer overflows. They also

have safe strings which makes string processing far easier than

in C or C++. The standard libraries of these languages have

simple, easy and guaranteed safe handling of high level data

structures like lists and dictionaries so I don't have the

write them from scratch.
However, most of the features above are also shared by languages

such as Ruby and Python. The big difference is that Ocaml and

Haskell programs compile to native binaries (like C and C++) and

that the compilers for these languages have a much more strict

type checkers (ie they find coding errors) than C or C++. This

means that many classes of bugs are found at compile time rather

than at run time like they would be for Ruby/Python/etc. The

native binaries produced from Ocaml and Haskell programs also

tend to run siginificantly faster than byte code interpretted

programs written in Ruby/Python/etc.
> also, I've noticed that at my local school most of the computer

quoted text
> science majors use C, so I figure that if I learn C, I can at least

> understand that course material on some level.

As you might guess from what I've written in this thread, I am

quite interested in programming langauge research. From what I

have seen of this feild, the vast majority of programming

language centered computer science research (ie PhD research

and papers in reviewed journals) is done around Haskell and to

a lesser extent Ocaml.
In summary, since your interest seems to be in improving your

knowledge about Linux and how your machine works, C is definitely

the language to look at. However, C has many traps, requires

strict attention to detail and can be rather unforgiving. Higher

level langauges like Python, Ruby, Ocaml and Haskell allow you

to concentrate more on the problem than on the details.
Good luck.
Cheers,

Erik

--

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Erik de Castro Lopo

http://www.mega-nerd.com/

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