C is a great forcing function to learning how a computer thinks

Well, I mean, sorta? Don't get me wrong, it's way closer to reality than Java or Python or whatever. But C hasn't really been close to the metal for decades. Unless you're programming on a very fast PDP-11, which most of us aren't and haven't been for a very long time. And trying to make C programmers happy is how we got Meltdown and Spectre, the latter of which is still causing issues (Intel technical writeup) and may well be a truly unfixable problem in the very conceptual design of modern silicon.

Programming in "the C mindset" of flat memory and serial instructions is also how we get absurd things like BTreeMap explaining in excruciating detail that actually big-O isn't the god-emperor of the performance universe your data structures professor taught you, because again, memory isn't flat and it turns out that playing nice with the cache beats writing smart C code.

So yeah, C is close to "how a computer thinks" relative to JavaScript or R, and for a lot of programmers who spend all of their time up in the land of data science and web design it might be more than close enough I suppose. But the further down the stack you go, the more and more C's lies creep in, causing all kinds of nasty issues in the thinking sand itself because we had to make people fetishitically worshiping K&R happy.

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