> by virtue of using C you will learn Assembly. Even interpreting this as charitably as possible--that you don't mean literally learning assembly but rather le

> by virtue of using C you will learn Assembly. Even interpreting this as charitably as possible--that you don't mean literally learning assembly but rather learning everything besides specific assembly syntax that you would have picked up from learning assembly--this claim doesn't hold water. For starters, C isn't that much closer to hardware than, say, Java. The main differences you have with C are that a) C has a pointers-are-almost-integers model [1] and b) C has a more limited runtime than other languages. C is still a fundamentally based on an abstract machine semantics model, and that abstract machine doesn't have a close bearing on modern hardware. In particular, C does not distinguish between registers and memory, and if I had to pick the single most salient feature of modern hardware you need to understand well to be able to say you understand how computers work, it's the register/memory distinction. If you think processors are mostly like they were in the 1970s--when you could say "add 1 to this memory location"--then C's shrugging off the register/memory distinction makes sense, but this is a situation that hasn't been true for several decades. Another failure of C is that it's far less expressive than assembly. There are features in other languages that are impossible to express in C. How do you write a function with multiple entry points, as you can in Fortran? Or a coroutine, as you can in Algol? Or nested functions, as in Pascal? Or try-catch, as in C++? Or functions with multiple return values, as in Matlab? Indeed, how do you write something like JMP *reg in C, a useful primitive for state machines? No, C does not come close to being a good description of modern processors, where "modern" means "anything that came out since I was born." [1] Not going to open up the can of worms that is pointer provenance.