I still can point to the exact point in my college career that took me to a whole new level of understanding how to program in Java or Python to understanding h

I still can point to the exact point in my college career that took me to a whole new level of understanding how to program in Java or Python to understanding how things like Garbage Collection, Threads, and other abstractions actually worked. It was an elective I took on Graphics Programming and it was all in C and OpenGL. Being without GC, I learned the trade offs. Obviously, being able to explicitly allocate and free memory was a big deal. But at the same time, I learned to appreciate the complexity and pitfalls of GC. Threads are great in Java (as are their parallels in other languages): this is the work to do, put the results here, and everything is cleaned up. Meanwhile, just trying to get the results back from a forked process was CRAZY. Implementing and managing my own shared memory to pass messages back and forth...wtfbbq. "Think like a computer," not really. More like, "understand what all goes into a thread, an async call, or a garbage collector. Gain more understanding into the corner cases and exactly how much this thing is doing for you. So maybe setting something to null or pre-allocating objects to reduce heap work isn't that big a deal." C taught me to be patient with higher level languages, to better understand what they were doing for me, be able to reason about how they may be doing these things wrong, and to think critically about how to coax these features into behaving the way I want them to. Really any lower level language can teach these things. The point here is that C is a nearly universal language that can teach you to reason about these things.