2025-09-04 -- I'm glad that I know some C
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I've  been  writing code in C for about 20 years now. Never as a profes-
sional C programmer and I don't dare saying "I know C", because  of  the
many pitfalls. But still, I've been using it for quite a while now and I
think that I have a "good enough" grasp of it.

There are many reasons why I like it. One of them came up today at work:

*Sometimes*,  one  of  our Python scripts would fail with "too many open
files".  I was able to debug this in a relatively short time  thanks  to
C. I won't go into the details, it's boring.

But the thing is: I could quickly write a little debug example in C. And
since  this  is  C, it a) is (relatively) low-level and b) (mostly) does
exactly what you tell it to. The problem at hand had to do with  dealing
with  file  descriptors and I could be pretty sure that nothing in the C
library/runtime gets in the way. When an FD is open, then it's open, end
of discussion. There is no garbage collection or auto-cleanup  or  what-
ever  --  these things exist in other languages and they can make debug-
ging hard at times.

C is systems programming without anything getting in the way.

Yes, it's error-prone and all that, but  that's  beside  the  point.  My
point is that C is a brilliant tool to help you understand what actually
goes  on  behind  the  scenes.  At  the same time, it's still high-level
enough as to not annoy you (unlike Assembler, for example).

I often try to motivate our young interns to pick up C  or  even  Assem-
bler, but it's really tough. They're not that much interested. I have to
admit,  though,  that  I did not frame C as a tool for "learning" in the
past. Maybe I should focus more on that. Maybe I should tell people: "If
you learn this language and a bit of  systems  programming  in  general,
then  you  will have a better understanding of virtually everything. You
can still use your favorite scripting language to make your web apps."