Skip to main content
Software Engineering

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

6
  • 2
    I've also seen it go other way round: People who understand how things "really" work at lower level look like they're trying to fit a square peg into round hole when learning high level languages. When you know (or think you know) what's going on under the hood, it's hard to resist doing all kinds of silly optimizations. For example, I've seen people setting object references to null in Java to "facilitate garbage collection" instead of just letting them fall out of scope, caching test expressions in for loops (when the compiler would actually do that for you) and such "too smart" stuff. Commented Dec 28, 2010 at 13:46
  • @Joonas, perhaps - but are you suggesting it's actually better to just be ignorant? Commented Dec 28, 2010 at 14:03
  • 1
    @Charles Salvia: I think it depends on what one is aiming for. If you want to do just web programming (the question's title is Should I Learn C/C++ Even If I Just Want To Do Web Programming?), then yes, I suggest that it's better to not learn C/C++. The point is that you're not getting paid for what you know. Nobody cares about that. You're getting paid for producing good enough, working code. And to produce good enough, working PHP / MySQL / HTTP stuff, knowing C/C++ is about the least important thing you need. Time is always limited, so focus on e.g. CSS, Javascript instead. Commented Dec 28, 2010 at 14:28
  • @Charles: "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." Understanding everything is good. Understanding just enough to think that you know better is not necessarily good. Commented Dec 28, 2010 at 15:06
  • 1
    C++ for OOP is terrible, sorry. The very term 'OOP' was invented by Smalltalk crowd; Smalltalk or Python or Ruby are good for learning about OOP. C++, like Fortran or even C, is a necessary evil when you need high performance and know the underlying mechanics well. Commented Dec 28, 2010 at 15:51