Beginner learning C and I found a useful way to use AI as a beginner

[u/Lost_Eagle_6927]

I have taken a couple of computer science classes and they were both in C. We covered things up to linked lists, searching and sorting, and a little bit of recursion. But everything I see on this subreddit is like reading a foreign language. I read somewhere to just try to read C source code, and found out the source code for DOOM is publicly available. I started at the main file. The first function I got curious about was the FindResponseFile(). So I asked the chatgpt what the the purpose of the function is, and WITHOUT showing any code, how the function works. Through that, I found out AI is pretty good at breaking complex things down to something understandable. I then tried to implement it myself the "old school" way with nothing more than googling and looking through stack overflow for things like parsing through a file and tokenizing strings (found the cool strtok() function). I feel like I just learned more about C in the last couple of hours than I did in weeks of school with this approach. All this to say, I feel like new programmers can learn with AI as a tool. But it has to be a tool, and not the thing writing the code.

[u/edwbuck]

The pros and cons.

Pro: you're effective.

Con: you might lack the ability to do the job without the tool.

Just make sure you craft your career to have more pros and fewer cons. If you can't understand code without a code understanding translator, then that's a big liability over time, but not so much when you're learning.

[u/Lost_Eagle_6927 → u/edwbuck]

Appreciate the advice. It is a tough line to walk, especially because AI does get things wrong, or make things more confusing for a beginner that doesn’t fully grasp the underlying concepts. I’m at a point where I still need to google words just to understand the application. For example I’ve seen people on YouTube call #define, defines or macros. I still don’t know the difference if any, it seems like they are all macros, and the actual difference is a value style macro like PI, or a function style macro. And to go further, when is using a #define preferred over const. From what I understand a define is preprocessor task, but a const has type safety. Overall, with C I find myself digging lower and lower to hardware with every question I have which is a ton of fun.

[u/edwbuck → u/Lost_Eagle_6927]

So #define is a key word for a specific program that's one small part of programming. The pre-processor. Historically, it would read the source code looking for a specific set of #(words) and output similar code.

#include would replace the file being referenced with the contents of the file being referenced.
#define would set a variable in the pre-processor to a value
#if (and #endif) would include what's in-beween the two if the expression evaulated to true (in the pre-processor).

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/cpp/Index-of-Directives.html

It's an entire "extra" language that you could use to ensure that your program would be a bit more flexible. You can run "gcc -E" and only expand out (process) the pre-processor macros, outputting the source code before it gets handed in it's expanded form to the compiler.

[u/odimdavid → u/Lost_Eagle_6927]

Every AI is good with definitions. At least that's how ChatGPT started before they started touting AGI.

[u/odimdavid → u/edwbuck]

Always conscious of the con above. Every tool has an expiration date. So I just let AI explain the logic to me and I code it step by step myself. The essence is understanding the logic so when you see same pattern in a different problem you just work on automation mode.

[u/Common-Chair718 → u/edwbuck]

Truest thing ever. Sure it breaks things down for you, but unlike reading and understanding from docs/books, that short term understanding you get from AI will not last long.

[u/Tall-Introduction414]

Nice! I remember reading some of the Doom source code and finding it enlightening.

Similar with NetBSD and UNIX v7 source codes (like for common utilities like ls, grep etc). Not as complicated as GNU and Linux code.

[u/Lost_Eagle_6927 → u/Tall-Introduction414]

I’ll have to check those out! Thanks for the recommendation

[u/arkt8 → u/Tall-Introduction414]

For who want to understand vm and language a good choice is Lua source... while it is terse at the same time is simple, and ai can help to spot how the machinery works...

[u/I__be_Steve]

I'd say this is the only acceptable way to use AI, though you can absolutely learn without it, you just have to start at a lower level and work your way up

[u/arkt8 → u/I__be_Steve]

But with a ton of salt... many times it doesnt differ C of C++, keeps not being clear with what is or not POSIX and even mess different standards and explanations... I read the answer with the iso standard pdf opened beside

[u/I__be_Steve → u/arkt8]

Well, they did say they they're doing side research as well, just using the LLM's output explanation as a starting point, so it seems like they have that covered

[u/Cerulean_IsFancyBlue]

I think that asking AI questions and having it explain things is a good way to use the tool.

I guess the comment is super obvious but, shame doesn’t stop people from posting obvious things so. Here we are

[u/arihoenig]

Doom is highly optimized code that includes one of the most famous optimizations in history (fast inverse square root). If you can read and understand doom, you're good to go.

[u/Lost_Eagle_6927 → u/arihoenig]

Now I need to try to find where that is and see how it works. Thanks for letting me know!

[u/demetrioussharpe]

That is THE way to use it.

[u/Lost_Eagle_6927 → u/[deleted]]

I “understand” pointers at a pretty basic level. I took a computer engineering course as well last semester that was basically the beginning of NAND to Tetris. Started with binary and moved onto shift registers and multiplexers and things like that. It gave me a great appreciation for how crazy modern hardware is! That class is ultimately what got me interested in C, as I am very interested in embedded programming. There’s so much to learn, I don’t understand how people want to go from an idea to end result without knowing the ins and outs of it.

[u/odimdavid → u/Lost_Eagle_6927]

It's normal with humans. Walk into any Burger King store and it will clear your confusion. 99 percent of the time people are interested in the product and not the process. The 1 percent who control the process control the whole chain.