Reading between the lines, it sounds like the author came back to C after learning to program, and sees quite a bit more in it than he did as a teenager. I had

Reading between the lines, it sounds like the author came back to C after learning to program, and sees quite a bit more in it than he did as a teenager. I had the same experience - I had a lot of fun writing programs as a kid, and taught myself C/C++ * . Still, I didn't learn anything about good coding conventions, programming in-the-large, etc. until a couple years later, when I discovered Linux and Perl (no waiting to compile!!!), and later Python, Emacs Lisp, Scheme, OCaml, Erlang, Prolog, ... Nowadays, my first choice is usually a mix of Lua and C, but I've learned a ton from every language along the way. C is useful for many things, but it's probably a terrible first language - until you have a fair amount of experience, there are just too many aspects of it that will bite you in the ass. Pointers are sharp tools, the type system is a joke, etc. * Quite literally, a mishmash of C and early C++. Hey, I was a kid learning from library books in the early nineties. That's what I think of when people say they program in "C/C++" - a naive mix of C and C++.