I think C is a great language to teach someone why all of the CS theory matters. When you write Java, almost everything you do will "work" and it will probably

I think C is a great language to teach someone why all of the CS theory matters. When you write Java, almost everything you do will "work" and it will probably run pretty fast on your Core i7. When you write C you have to be much more deliberate. There's no massive standard library to do arr.sort() for you and you have to really think about how to implement some basic processes that you took for granted. I think C made me a much better Java programnmer because I now understand what the most minimal way to complete a task can be. No more HashMap<String, ArrayList<Object>> once you've played with structs and C arrays.