I say learn Rust and C in parallel. I'm learning Rust now after several false starts. Here's what I find challenging and interesting about Rust: most languages

I say learn Rust and C in parallel. I'm learning Rust now after several false starts. Here's what I find challenging and interesting about Rust: most languages exist on a spectrum between faithfulness and abstraction, where they either represent the underlying hardware in an accurate way (like C), or they provide high level abstractions that allow you to simplify your mental model of how a computer works (like python). Rust is interesting in that it uses abstractions which don't lead to a simpler mental model. There's no such thing as 'lifetimes' from the computer's perspective. And yet these abstractions, though somewhat artificial, can still shape your code in beneficial ways. I think that learning Rust without having exposure to C would make it difficult to recognize which constraints that Rust imposes are based on actual limitations of the machine vs Rust's particular paradigm. So I say learn them both.