Simon Willison’s Weblog

Does one still need to learn C/C++ if one just wants to build web applications?

24th December 2011

My answer to Does one still need to learn C/C++ if one just wants to build web applications? on Quora

No—you don’t need any knowledge of C or C++ to get started building web apps—I know plenty of extremely smart and talented web developers who have never written a line of production C in their while careers.

That said, it’s still worth learning C some day (C++ maybe not so much, unless you want to get stuck in to deep browser internals) because C is the foundation of most of the tools we use, and understanding how it works will make you a more effective web engineer even if you never have to write anything with it.