I think it's helpful to learn a little bit of C, to understand why computers work at all, and how we can get, step by step, from bits and bytes to higher-level

I think it's helpful to learn a little bit of C, to understand why computers work at all, and how we can get, step by step, from bits and bytes to higher-level "things". Long ago, a friend of mine - a brilliant developer, who nevertheless never dug any lower than basic C++, once tried to write a simple C program that printed out some text. His first attempt went something like: void greet(char *name) { char *text = "Hello, "; text += name; text += "\n"; printf(text); } It was a lot of fun going together over his program, and exploring why things didn't work the way he expected!