Why do so many people seem to think the author is advocating that you learn C as a first language? Did you read the article? He explicitly says the opposite: D

Why do so many people seem to think the author is advocating that you learn C as a first language? Did you read the article? He explicitly says the opposite: Does someone brand new to programming, who’s excited about making changes in the HTML on a page or setting up a blog to later customize, or just wants a slow introduction to more complex topics, really need to worry about cache coherency? Or threading? Clearly that’s a problem for down the road. Maybe that’s a road that some developers will never need to walk down at all, depending on their focus. His position is that, while C may not be the best language for everyone coming into programming it is beneficial to learn it eventually because it allow you to peel back the layers of abstraction underneath all of the goodies in your high-level language. This allows you to better understand and reason about even your higher-level code and opens the door to fixing and understanding a lot of things that would have constrained you previously. I completely, whole-heartedly agree. We don't always need to be able to plumb the depths of our abstraction stack. I don't believe it is necessary for a beginner. But having the ability to go up or down in the stack is extremely valuable. C is worth learning.