The dog is dead, post nonfunctional code

printf

I don’t think C gets enough credit. Sure, C doesn’t love you. C isn’t about love–C is about thrills. C hangs around in the bad part of town. C knows all the gang signs. C has a motorcycle, and wears the leathers everywhere, and never wears a helmet, because that would mess up C’s punked-out hair. C likes to give cops the finger and grin and speed away. Mention that you’d like something, and C will pretend to ignore you; the next day, C will bring you one, no questions asked, and toss it to you with a you-know-you-want-me smirk that makes your heart race. Where did C get it? “It fell off a truck,” C says, putting away the boltcutters. You start to feel like C doesn’t know the meaning of “private” or “protected”: what C wants, C takes. This excites you. C knows how to get you anything but safety. C will give you anything but commitment

In the end, you’ll leave C, not because you want something better, but because you can’t handle the intensity. C says “I’m gonna live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse,” but you know that C can never die, not so long as C is still the fastest thing on the road.

As long as we program over Von Neumann architectures CPUs, C will be king. C is basically a description language for a Von Neumann pipeline process, and almost all languages we use run atop the same architecture.

Every programmer should know C, because it's a simple and beautiful language that teaches a lot about how programs and computers actually work.

Few programmers should actually work in C, because there really is no need to.

Types are actually VERY simple in C. bool is a boolean. int is a natural number. double is a real one. char is a character and a string is an array of characters. If you put a * after them they are pointers. They don't need to care about their size or how they are implemented either.

When you look at a program beginners would write C is quite simple and beautiful. Easy to understand what's happening.

I think learning C first, let's you appreciate Rust a lot more and also helps a lot in understanding it. C is a prettg raw and dangerous language, but it is also close enough to the machine, while not being a system specific assembler. So it can teach you about memory layouts and about the dangers of manual memory management and data races.

While Rust probably could teach you that, I think it is more likely, that you get annoyed, why you should have to deal with a stupid borrow checker. But when you already know, what is dangerous, your probably glad to have it. Also I think that C is just closer to how CPUs operate, so it is good to get a basic feel of low level programming.