are they really not teaching students C for systems programming in universities? I get that not everyone learns programming in an academic setting, but I routinely see articles explain pointers and memory management like they're artifacts of an earlier era.
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@2ck We did C for about five weeks, then the language became C++ with some university-specific extensions that made it more like the contract/specification programming model you get in Ada. Basically C was just introduced to show us how lucky we were to work in a language that takes care of those details for us.
@khird That's fine. What bothers me is that I encounter programmers who don't understand how to actually manage resources carefully, or they don't get what a reference is. Besides that we rely on code that was written in C and code that still *is* being written in C, so many tools and patterns of thought come from people dealing with C, that you just have this huge gap in your understanding of the history and current state of computing if you don't know it.
Also, just so no one accuses me of boosting C: I haven't done more edit a few lines of C in years, and I probably wouldn't start a project intending to primarily write C code today. I just think it's valuable to grok what K&R were up to here.