C. Often people don’t learn anything about a language’s internals, or a computer’s internals, when they learn a “nice” language with garbage collection and dyn

C. Often people don’t learn anything about a language’s internals, or a computer’s internals, when they learn a “nice” language with garbage collection and dynamic typing and massages. IMO for long-term software engineering that stuff is important to know. Many see C as this old, outdated, uncool language, and never even realise that so many other languages are written in it. But really, when it comes to perf and correctness, it’s still king: - Often you can try to optimize a simple python program to make it run faster... or you can rewrite it in C and get a 1000x boost for free - It has compilers that have proofs of correctness - There are many tools that can prove a C program’s correctness - It’s still the best way (IMO) to learn how the computer works while learning the language - It doesn’t have OOP (which makes me sad), but you can get there by writing C++ as “C with classes” - It probably has the most job security guarantees of any language: it will be a looooong time before C goes away - It’s so standard and supported, programs from 40 years ago still run today; I don’t know if you can say that about any other language (except like, COBOL)