> cease teaching it to every student > Just telling on yourself, "I can't write software without training wheels" I think both of these reactions go too far,

> cease teaching it to every student > Just telling on yourself, "I can't write software without training wheels" I think both of these reactions go too far, in opposite directions. Of course the fact that C is difficult doesn't mean that we should stop teaching it. It could just as well mean the opposite, that we need to teach it better, certainly as long as it stays in widespread use. But at the same time, we should acknowledge that C is difficult even for experienced professionals, and that "not knowing how pointers work" isn't the main reason every large C and C++ codebase on earth has memory corruption vulnerabilities. (I'm sure that's not literally true. Someone somewhere must've written a lot of perfect C code. But I think the usual posterchild for well-tested C is sqlite, and even sqlite has had memory corruption issues in the wild.)