What is an example in which knowing C will make me write better code in any other language?

Question

In the Stack Overflow podcasts, Joel Spolsky constantly harps on Jeff Atwood about Jeff not knowing how to write code in C. His statement is that \"knowing C helps you write bet

Answer 1

I don't think there can be any specific example.

What learning C does for you is give you an insight, a broadening of the mind, into how computers (and software) work. It's a very abstract thing ..

It doesn't make you write better code in python, it just makes you more of a computer scientist.

The reference that Wedge made to Joel's article mentioning Shlemiel the painter is an interesting one but has no relevance here. That algorithm is not tied to C in any particular way (although it manifests itself in null-terminated strings).

Python's strings are immutable anyway, and completely different from C's model of strings, so I don't quite see the relationship.

I suppose one concrete example is optimizing a parser or a lexer or a program that keeps writing to a string buffer all the time. If you use normal strings instead of a string buffer, you'll run across a problem when you build very large strings.

Consider that:

a = a + b 

makes a copy of both a and b. It doesn't change the string that was referenced by a, it creates a new string, allocating more memory, etc.

If a becomes considerably large, and you keep adding small things to it, then Shlemiel the painter will manifest himself.

But then again, knowing this has nothing to do with knowing C, just knowing how your language implements things at the low level. (This is where having an experiece in C will help you).