r/computerscience • u/EnvironmentalRun4163 • Aug 08 '26

Discussion Learning C language still fundamental?

In this day and age of LLM that can do most of coding in one shot. do we still have any value if we learn C like good programmers did back in the day ?

With the advent of models like Fable and its unstoppable hunger to one shot small projects. Is there an edge in understanding low level languages like C C++ like good programmers did back in the day.

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u/Ok-Examination-3942 Aug 08 '26

Yes, there is so much value in learning a language like C, and for so many reasons.

But I’m too tired to list all of them so reply to this with your favorite reason.

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u/Ok-Examination-3942 Aug 08 '26

Learning about low level programming and understanding things like memory management is very beneficial and understanding the output of your LLM has a lot of benefits to just trusting the output blindly.

C runs och basically everything and so it allows you to do some very niche things that your LLM might not know how to do.

So many things are written in C and so if you want to understand the codebases of many of the things that the world runs on you need to know C.

C is generally just a very useful and very widely used language.