What I wished I knew when learning C
This article is a response/take on both Daniel Bachler's article on learning F# and Hillel Wayne's on the hard part of learning a new language. I thought it would be educational and a fun exercise to read this article, but covering C.
Often teaching tutorials don't focus as much on the surrounding ecosystem of how to do development, what tooling to use, or some deeper lore. Almost all of this stuff is generally documented (and where a good source exists, I'll try and add a link), but there's nowhere that has attempted to create a consistent, coherent listing of most of this information.
This document is almost certainly incomplete! There's lots of information out there, and I probably got some of it wrong. I'm also not at all familiar with many ecosystems, like the Mac, and thus can't really speak to it.
C is many ways a foundational language to other ecosystems -- it is not unusual for other programming languages to depend partly or completely on a C compiler to bootstrap it's compiler or runtime, many languages use C as the defacto Foreign Function Interface, and for several systems system utilities are exposed as C libraries you call into. If the question of "Should I write this in C?" comes up, it's totally possible you might not have any other major options.
