Comment by laweijfmvo

3 months ago

interesting perspective of someone who is presumably quite competent in javascript and learning/seeing c for the first time. i guess i'm just old but i'm used to everyone having exposure to c (or a c-style language) as their first language.

I am used to thinking that if i want to post code that "anyone" would understand it'd be in C but i wonder if nowadays JavaScript would be a better choice (as long as it applies to JS anyway) for a "lingua franca".

(Python might be another choice but i don't really like writing it :-P)

  • One problem with C or C style code like JavaScript is that it often uses opaque special characters like various different brackets where the meaning isn't self-explanatory. E.g. "if (A) {B}". This can be expressed more naturally with "if A then B end if" in pseudocode. Or another C offender: "a = b". In pseudocode this would typically be "a ← b" or perhaps "a := b".