I wish someone spoon fed me how to add path for C compilers in Windows back in the day. We lose a good 90% of people to installing C from ever learning C. Feel like godbolt or an online compiler might be a reasonable starting place these days. C is amazing but can be so punishing early on compared to stupid opening up any text editor on earth and writing an HTML file. Not advocating for more JS learning but it's hard to beat the getting started on that.
Which is really stupid, given that is no more complicated then opening any text editor and then starting the compiler with that file. You can just double-click the file and select open with the compiler and it would work.
I still had trouble setting up C on my home PC when I was a teenager. I read The C Programming Language and really enjoyed it but couldn't figure out how to get the code to run at home. I went to the local community college and took an intro class that used C++ then I took AP Comp Sci using Java and left the C family behind.
Another option might be that Nth pass LLM output is not as good as (N+5 months)th pass LLM output. At some point before the amount of effort involved reaches that required to do it oneself, the output will reach an acceptable quality level... or so you'd hope, if any of this business is to make any sense.
The author is right about C leading to better understanding of computers, OSes and other languages.
For me a breakthrough moment was when I saw my C code interleaved with the generated assembly. Registers, calling conventions, calling OS functions…all laid bare!
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It's unlikely that a large volume of text will be generated at the base rate (errors compound), so the number might be higher than we expect.
(Here is a reference to K&R, the standard first reference to C, because I am obligated to make such a reference.)
For me a breakthrough moment was when I saw my C code interleaved with the generated assembly. Registers, calling conventions, calling OS functions…all laid bare!