absolutely! C is so widespread that you should be conversant in it as a software practitioner, whether as a programmer shipping code or a scientist making tools

absolutely! C is so widespread that you should be conversant in it as a software practitioner, whether as a programmer shipping code or a scientist making tools and working with others tools. however you can explore what computer science has to offer without subjecting yourself to C. I think that "computer science" has more to do with "optimizing algorithms for efficiency" and less to do with "staring at stack traces and wondering why gdb is so bad"