Ryan Peterman

I'm not going to use C in my day-to-day full-stack job.

So why do I need to learn this?

For this podcast, I produce transcripts for every episode for convenient skimming, and I built a custom tool to automate that.

Recently, I noticed in the Barbara Liskov transcript, my simple speech-to-text tool was getting a lot of things wrong.

For instance, the CLU programming language is spelled, all caps, C-L-U, not CLU.

So to fix this, I used Cursor 3, picked the strongest version of Opus 4.7 Extra High, and had an agent make a plan to fix that.

And while I was waiting, I figured I'd trigger a few more agents for code cleanups and front-end improvements.

It generated a reasonable plan with rich system diagrams.

It applied all the changes within minutes and worked on the first try.

So if you want to build something with the flexibility of sending off a bunch of agents with frontier models of your choice, you can go to cursor.com to try out Cursor 3.

This is not my perspective, but I was doing research and I saw a YouTube video that said, whatever you do, don't take CS50 clickbait, whatever.

So I watched the video.

So it worked.

Yeah, it got me.

And the perspective of the author of this video was that

CS50 teaches you all the stuff that you don't really need to know if you were like a full stack engineer or something.

If I was just going into the industry and I'm just making web apps that a lot of this underlying stuff you might not need.

And maybe it's not a good use of time.

And I'm curious what you would say to someone that has that mindset that you don't need to actually know how the computer works.

I was looking at the syllabus and there's C, obviously, and there's all the basic data structures, those types of things, bread and butter.