I expected (or should I say hoped) C knowledge would transfer because - that's my main point of reference for a programming language where you care about memory

I expected (or should I say hoped) C knowledge would transfer because - that's my main point of reference for a programming language where you care about memory. I don't think there's anything particularly unusual about it - were I to seriously learn haskell, I'd hope whatever knowledge I had of Ocaml would put me in a good position. Your blog was spot on - with the caveat that people who know C++ can easily "learn" stuff like Java and C# but tend to write very C++ flavoured Java and C#.