I've a different experience. I started with C as my main language. For years I touched C very rarely, and focused on Scheme, FORTH, SmallTalk, Tcl, and other no

I've a different experience. I started with C as my main language. For years I touched C very rarely, and focused on Scheme, FORTH, SmallTalk, Tcl, and other non conventional languages. What I found is that my knowledge of C did not prepared me to understand the higher order abstractions, like call-cc, or the pure nature of object oriented programming (that IMHO you don't capture learning C++, but only with SELF/SmallTalk). Later after learning call-cc or functional programming I could make sense of that language features in a C implementation of the interpreter maybe, but, it is a separated process: - If you stay low level you don't understand high level abstractions. And this will weight as a negative thing in your C code as well. - If you stay high level you don't understand how it actually works at the machine level. You freaking need both. The problem of certain languages is that they are not like C, but they are also not like SmallTalk or Lisp or FORTH. They just resemble a more dynamic version of C, so you don't really gasp fully any of those levels. However if you pick the languages to learn wisely, the magical thing is that once you take a trip in the higher order abstractions, you return back to C and code in a different way.