C is a system programming language which is old but with “bad” fame: undefined behavior, notorious memory related bugs, etc. Especially with Go and Rust having gone viral right now, C seems already forgotten by people. Nevertheless, IMHO, C is still a thing which is worth for you spending some time on it.
Whether you are are a C novice or a C veteran，I highly recommend you read Modern C if you haven’t read it before. Then you will find C also evolves stealthily and is not as primitive as you think. E.g., C11 has defined standard thread APIs like C++ has done, which makes C more like a “modern” language, not an outdated thing. You may get a new perspective of C from this book.
Regardless if you are a systems language programmer, DevOps, performance engineer or wear other hats, the more you know about the Operating System, the more you can do your job better. Take all prevailing Unix-like Operating Systems as an example, from kernel to command line tools, they are almost implemented in C. To study related source code can make you delve into Operating System internal deeper. E.g., I knew there is a taskset command which can bind specified process of a dedicated CPU, but I wanted to know the magic behind it, so I went through its code. Then I learned 2 things:
a) There is a “/proc/%pid/task” folder which records thread information of process;
b) taskset actually calls sched_setaffinity and sched_getaffinity APIs to attain its goal.
Last but not least, because C is so “low-level”, you can leverage it to write highly performant code to squeeze out CPU when performance is critical in some scenarios.
Although I have listed many reasons which I think you should learn C, you may have sufficient excuses to refuse to dabble into C too. It doesn’t matter. But if you want to give C a shot, firstly you should not be scared of it. There are many ways of writing wrong C code, but you only need to make sure what you write is correct and in defined behavior, that’s all about C programming.
>There are many ways of writing wrong C code, but you only need to make sure what you write is correct and in defined behavior
The “don’t make mistakes” advice is as universal as it’s useless. 😉
>Take all prevailing Unix-like Operating Systems as an example, from kernel to command line tools, they are almost implemented in C
In the 70’s you had to know a bunch of assembly languages to study or contribute to then-existing OSes. They all have been rewritten in something else.
>because C is so “low-level” you can leverage it to write highly performant code to squeeze out CPU when performance is critical in some scenarios.
You can also use a well-design language that compiles to native code instead. Ada for systems stuff (Ada 2012 has a formal verification tool integrated). Julia or Fortran 95/2003 for number crunching.
The dichotomy is not C vs Ruby. It’s 60’s design vs the other 50 years of programming language research. By treating C as something else than legacy, you’d be missing out a lot.
C is still KING of the embedded world
I agree totally. C is classic language which should be learned, not like Go or other languages which are all about hype.