Before we begin, let me defend the somewhat outrageous title of this article with an analogy: You can make your own bread with a prepackaged mix, a bread machine and some electricity—or, you can assemble the raw ingredients, a mixing bowl, a stout spoon, a dough blade, fire up the oven and get some cardio through kneading. If it’s just fresh bread you’re after, the machine gets you there.

But if you want to understand the underlying process and have the most options when it comes to the final product, you need to put in the effort of the manual method. This is a lot like tackling the C programming language: You have to dig down into the flour and get your hands dusty, but you end up understanding the process at an intimate level.

Learning C will teach you the underlying principles of the computer architecture, such as, for example, pointers, which are, indeed, fundamental for everyone who wants to create their own programs.

Learning the fundamentals of programming

However, I do think there are advantages to learning C first over more high-level programming languages (like C++ and Python). When you work with languages like Java, C#, and even Python, you immediately start moving away from learning the fundamentals of a programming language and you start learning associated libraries and frameworks. But with C you get a few library calls, you stay focused on the semantics of the language longer, and C often forces you to think harder and deeper about what’s happening under the hood.

Middle Level Language

C is a middle-level programming language not a low-level programming language.When you learn to program in C you almost have to gain an understanding of how programs execute. You know what things like register, stack, heap and memory mapped IO mean.

Speed and Efficient

Programs written in C are also wicked fast and efficient. So, you always know what to do when your program doesn’t run fast enough.

Not only C programs by itself are efficient, but the language syntax itself teaches you how to write efficient and fast code: C has raw pointers, static memory concept and much more. You will learn why it is better to pass big objects through the reference to other functions than by value