after struggling with concepts that are about equivalently difficult to recursion or pointer arithmetic I think that's a bit optimistic. Even within the realms

after struggling with concepts that are about equivalently difficult to recursion or pointer arithmetic I think that's a bit optimistic. Even within the realms of human programming languages, competence may require struggling with concepts that are as difficult as, say, monads or virtual destructors or Prolog cuts or abstract factory factory factory factories or call-with-current-continuation. Those are all at least one step up from recursion or pointers. I don't see any reason to expect that alien languages would be nearer in conceptual difficulty to C than to Haskell or C++ or Scheme or Prolog.