2021-04-13

Learning some ‘C’ is worth your time.

Am I arguing that a run of the mill empiricist needs the computational firepower that comes from deep ‘C’ expertise, no. Not at all.

But, ‘C’ underpins so much of modern computing that I’m finding it to be very high leverage learning. A small amount of effort is giving me volumes of clarity on the syntax of languages and tools that I’m already exposed to. Stata, for example really sings when it’s being used in a simple, declarative, one-line-at-a-time kind of a way. Especially if you’re confining your use to the analysis portion of your project. Comparing use, regress, areg, reghdfe and esttab to their peers is pretty astounding. You can get a ‘publication quality’ \LaTeX table in three clean readable lines. However, as soon as you start doing anything else you start to find all sorts of strange things in the Stata syntax. Everything that’s confusing about local and global macros (what are they? why do they work the way that they do? are they variables? how do they relate to columns and scalars and matrices?) suddenly becomes clear when you read about macro substitution in ‘C’ and pay attention to the fact that Stata is written in ‘C’, and so the folks that are making the Stata that we interact with are deeply steeped in ‘C’ idioms!

Why can we increment a local using local i += 1? Because this seems like a normal thing to do if you live in ‘C’. Why do loops live in squirrely braces? Because that’s where they live in ‘C’. To me this was odd, I was expecting something a little more like the structure in python or bash. Using open and closed brackets across lines wouldn’t have occurred to me, but to a ‘C’ programmer nothing else would have occurred. Why do some commands start with octothorps? Super strange, unless you’re a ‘C’ programmer, then it’s a super normal thing to do!

So, do I think that we all need to run out and learn to write compilers? Nope. Not at all. But, do I think it’s worth picking up a silly¹ 100 page book like Victory at ‘C’ and reading it with more interest than you expected to. Which is what I did.

1. It’s silly because of the puns, not because of any shortcoming other than the puns. ↩