I was recently reminded of this, which I originally posted in the xkcd fora some months ago, but I figured some DIC folks might enjoy it as well:

Binary, hex, and so forth are written (or coded, or otherwise nonverbal) systems for representing numeric values. Typically, if you need to express a numeric value verbally, you use decimal. If you need...

This was something I wrote in one of the many "which language should I learn" threads. (link)

I wrote it last night, and I still think it's good, so I'm going to put it here. This is in response to someone who said, paraphrasing, "I'll learn C++ now, and I'll come back to the C later on."

I recognize this,...