True, but a good C course should explain exactly those concepts and what kind of problems (in relation to assembly and other HLLs) was C meant to solve back at

True, but a good C course should explain exactly those concepts and what kind of problems (in relation to assembly and other HLLs) was C meant to solve back at the time. I would highlight the following: * Structured programming support, which means nested loops and conditionals without a primary need for "goto" jumps, enabling a sense of "depth" that is missing in the "flat" world of assembly * Expression-oriented syntax, meaning that operators (even those having a side-effect) return a value of a certain type, and can be nested, again enabling recursive program structure versus a flattened one * Global symbol allocation and resolution, which means that a programmer uses names rather than addresses to refer to global variables and functions * Abstraction over function calling conventions, which enables the programmer not to worry about function prologues and epilogues and the order of pushing arguments on the stack or in registers * Automatic storage management, meaning that a function-scope local variable is used by the programmer with its name and the compiler decides whether to put it in a register or at a certain offset in the stack frame * Rudimentary integer-based type system that has the distinction between a scalar and a fixed-size collection of scalars laid-out sequentially (arrays), and special integers called "pointers", supporting a different set of operations (dereferencing to a certain type and adding or subtracting other integers from them, without any safety guarantees whatsoever) Nothing more, nothing less. Not understanding these foundations is the source of major pain.