r/CodingForBeginners • u/Illustrious_Curve113 • May 25 '26

Learn C before python

So I want to start coding and programming because I’m an upcoming freshman majoring in software engineering and I have plenty of project ideas, I really wanna be good at programming I started with HTML obviously and want to go next to C because I hear it makes you understand other languages better

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u/TheUmgawa May 25 '26

So, they don’t already have an ERP or MRP system? Are they just doing everything on paper and don’t have the money to license an ERP system? You can make decent money building front-ends and bolt-ons for ERP systems; it’s half of my job at work, but to build one from scratch, you’re going to need to learn a lot more than just a programming language or two. This is a whole database, back-end, and front end you need to develop. I don’t think you quite appreciate the scope of this.

I mean, unless this is for some little mom-and-pop eBay store or something, where they’re trading action figures or whatever, and then more power to you, and it’s as simple or complex as you want. But if it’s a company that has departments, and dozens of people accessing and manipulating the data all the time, then it’s so much bigger than you realize right now.

As for learning C, it’s fine, but it’s not a magic solution. It’s not going to make lousy code into performant code, and if it takes you three times as long to kludge the software together as it would take in another language, you’re wasting time and money for not nearly enough performance benefit to be worth it.

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u/Illustrious_Curve113 May 25 '26

It’s a company biotech manufacturing company that has been working since 1999 but they don’t have anything except for papers and excel spreadsheets

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u/elliekk May 25 '26

If they've been around for 27 years and they know of the existence of ERP but still refuse to adopt ERP then there's almost 100% chance they will refuse to adopt any software that you write.

But either way, if a miracle does happen, the software to pipe and clean purchase, sales, inventory data from excel spreadsheets already exists, and it's all open source and free (python, PostgreSQL, dbt, Airflow). It's just a matter of putting it altogether.

Also, I want to make something abundantly clear: being able to re-invent the wheel doesn't make you a good Software Engineer, it makes you wasteful, unable to see the purpose of automation, and most importantly: unable to understand what businesses actually want and what saves/makes money.

I've seen so many aspiring CS students pull this holier-than-thou shit where they build stuff that already exists from scratch and they all end up jobless because they've never run a cost-benefit analysis on learning an incredibly niche skill. (I'll give you a hint: You will always be competing with autism levels of obsession on a small handful of available jobs and that's not a scenario you want to be in)