I'm referring to something Joel Spolsky keeps telling Jeff Atwood (both of Stackoverflow) Joel says that even if you are not going to be programming in C, learning it will stand you in good stead. As much as I hate C (hate is perhaps too strong a word), I kind of agree with him. I was thinking about this in the context of garbage collection. Everybody seems to love garbage collection, and it seems to be the number one must have feature for Delphi. I guess the theory goes, if you don't have to think about freeing your objects, then your code will have less bugs in it, and thus by default you are a better programmer. Does it work that way? Not really. I recently had the misfortune to have a look at some Delphi code written by someone who clearly didn't know that objects were his responsibility. Objects were being created left, right and centre, and not being freed after use. There were a few attempts at freeing objects, but this was just a misguided assignment of nil to various objects. It was a mess, and the application leaked like a sieve (a colander for you Americans out there!) Would garbage collection have made his code any better? To be honest, I don't think it would. Ok, it would have freed the developer from the responsibility of freeing his objects, but he just didn't get the basics of being a programmer. His code would still have sucked. It would have leaked a little less for sure, but it would still have been a maintenance nightmare. And you know what, garbage collection would have probably masked the fact this guy didn't know what he was doing. His application would have worked. We'd perhaps have noticed further down the line when it is much more expensive to fix. Delphi wasn't as forgiving, and rudely protested with multiple access violations.
So, yes, garbage collection is cool, saves time and typing (40% I'm told), but I fear we're growing a generation of script kiddies (apologies to script gurus, who know what they are doing), who can get an application (albeit a small one) up and running, but have created an albatross around the neck of the next guy to inherit their code. So, yeah, C maybe a dying language, and pointer manipulation and managing your own memory maybe dying concepts, but learning the basics of how to program is essential, and it's these languages and concepts that best help you do that.
There's a perfect analogy in the world of (real)languages. Latin is a dead language, but for years, it was taught in schools, and students hated it, because it was of no use to them in every day life, or so they thought. The thing is though, so many modern languages are based on Latin, that anyone with a knowledge of Latin, is automatically a better linguist. His English, Italian, French, Spanish etc etc will automatically be so much better for having learnt Latin.
So by all means, let's have garbage collection, let's have all these coder aids, but let's not forget how to program.
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