My experience is you can get to where you think you know C in a few days. But it may take decades to become aware of all its footguns, and much more time to lea

My experience is you can get to where you think you know C in a few days. But it may take decades to become aware of all its footguns, and much more time to learn how to program C in a way that avoids them -- if that can be done by humans at all. (Maybe our new AI overlords will figure it out.) Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. Deprecate C for all greenfield development, and launch a big-science push to rewrite all the extant load-bearing C code in something else with safety guarantees (Rust=good, SPARK=better). If null pointers were a billion dollar mistake, then letting C become ubiquitous was a mistake that runs in the trillions.