I wish someone spoon fed me how to add path for C compilers in Windows back in the day. We lose a good 90% of people to installing C from ever learning C. Feel like godbolt or an online compiler might be a reasonable starting place these days. C is amazing but can be so punishing early on compared to stupid opening up any text editor on earth and writing an HTML file. Not advocating for more JS learning but it's hard to beat the getting started on that.
Which is really stupid, given that is no more complicated then opening any text editor and then starting the compiler with that file. You can just double-click the file and select open with the compiler and it would work.
I still had trouble setting up C on my home PC when I was a teenager. I read The C Programming Language and really enjoyed it but couldn't figure out how to get the code to run at home. I went to the local community college and took an intro class that used C++ then I took AP Comp Sci using Java and left the C family behind.
Another option might be that Nth pass LLM output is not as good as (N+5 months)th pass LLM output. At some point before the amount of effort involved reaches that required to do it oneself, the output will reach an acceptable quality level... or so you'd hope, if any of this business is to make any sense.
I always find, whenever I loan Peter Van der Lindens’ “Deep C Secrets: Expert C Programming” book to a fellow colleague, I never get it back. For a while I had 10 or so spare copies to hand out as treats, but now I just refer everyone to this PDF:
And the K&R reference is useful too. It's a small book about a small language that does not have many features and maps to very basic concepts on hardware that really only does very basic things.
The author is right about C leading to better understanding of computers, OSes and other languages.
For me a breakthrough moment was when I saw my C code interleaved with the generated assembly. Registers, calling conventions, calling OS functions…all laid bare!
I can (it's really obvious here) and wish I couldn't. Every time I run into something I might wanna read, but it turns out to be LLM "assisted" writing after I've already invested some time, it feels like I was tricked into eating cardboard.
And when I bring up that this should be clearly marked, preferably up front, it's often taken as a personal slight.
I realize this is a me problem to some extend, I shouldn't feel strongly about this, but I do.
There are some very small tells, like the constant "rule of threes" that AI loves to follow, but you're right that this is much harder to tell than it used to be.
