Learning C as the first programming language

The question of which programming language is the best beginner language is a hotly debated one. When I was researching which language I should learn, the best advice I came across was from David Kopec, who advises to think about the following three things in this order of importance:

More important than the choice of language is to pick a language and stick with it for a while.
Choose a language that is popular enough and has a welcoming community so that it has a lot of resources available to learn from.
The last thing to think about is to pick a language that is popular in the niche that you want to eventually develop for (i.e., if you already have a specialty in mind, e.g., web, mobile, ML, OS, etc.).

Popular languages

Let’s first look at the popularity of the top programming languages according to GitHub’s Octoverse 2024:

Different measures of popularity will give different rankings, but this picture gives us a great overview of the past 10 years in programming languages. I think five of the most commonly suggested programming languages to learn when you start out are:

Python
JavaScript
Java
C
C++

Looking at the above picture, it’s no surprise that the most common suggestion these days for the best first language is Python. It has a relatively simple syntax, can be used for a variety of different applications, and is widely and increasingly used in the industry. Python is really not a bad choice at all and I almost went for it, especially because I was starting out during the GenAI hype, which massively boosted the Python hype. Even before the latest AI boom, Python’s popularity was growing. But now it has overtaken JavaScript as the most used language on GitHub.

JavaScript has a massive developer base and has been the most popular programming language for many years, mainly thanks to it being the language of web browsers. JavaScript also gets a fair bit of criticism due to its perceived fundamental design flaws that go back to its history of originally being developed in just 10 days. Also, having such a simple and flexible syntax, it is very easy to write bad JavaScript code, and there is in fact a lot of bad JavaScript code out there. This is another major reason it is criticized so much. It is accused of promoting bad coding practices.

Java was once the rising star of programming languages due to it being platform-independent and its use in the Android ecosystem. Its popularity has taken a hit in recent years, mainly because Kotlin has become the preferred language for Android app development. Java is still a very popular and very important programming language, especially because many large corporations have built their backend systems in it.

C is the oldest programming language in our list (and in most lists of programming languages these days). More than 50 years after it was first created, it continues to rank among the top 10 most popular programming languages. C still powers an enormous amount of infrastructure in the world, ranging from the largest supercomputers to the smallest microcontrollers and embedded systems. It is a relatively low-level programming language. That means C gets you as close to the hardware as possible, short of using assembly language. It also means it leaves a lot to the programmer instead of automatically taking care of basic things like memory management for you. This makes it a somewhat “difficult” language in the world of today’s higher-level programming languages. Even though the language itself is quite small, C makes it very easy to make serious mistakes with consequences like crashing the system. So one always needs to be extra-careful when programming in it. And this is probably the main reason C has recently been falling out of favor, as newer languages like Go and Rust offer the performance and power of C without its drawbacks. But there is only so much you can expect from a 50-year-old programming language. Still, the case for C as the first programming language is strong due to its unparalleled educational value. More on this in a bit.

C++ was created to be an improvement upon C and to be its object-oriented version. When C++ was originally developed, all C code could be seamlessly run with C++, but that is no longer the case. The two languages have diverged quite a bit in the ensuing decades, even though they are still often mentioned as C/C++, as if they are almost the same. Unlike C, C++ has evolved to become a behemoth of a language, with so many features that it can be overwhelming. So you will often hear things like “C++ is a kitchen sink language” or that “nobody really is an expert in C++”. It gets a lot of flak for this and many other reasons. For example, Linus Torvalds (the creator of Linux and Git) famously said:

C++ is a horrible language… the choice of C is the only sane choice… C++ leads to really really bad design choices.

In any case, C++ is one of the most popular languages today, finding applications in a variety of niches including systems development, desktop applications, video games, embedded systems, servers, and more. C++ provides a combination of:

C-like performance and low-level access to hardware, and;
non-C-like higher-level features and ease of use.

More on C

Due to both historical accidents and C’s merits, C has stood the test of time. Despite being so powerful, C is in fact a very small language and it is easy to quickly get up to speed with it (it only has 30-50 keywords, depending on which standard you are looking at).

Famously, C makes it very easy to shoot yourself in the foot because it leaves all the onus of higher-level functionality on the programmer. To quote directly from the legendary book The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie (the latter being the creator of C):

C provides no operations to deal directly with composite objects such as character strings, sets, lists or arrays. There are no operations that manipulate an entire array or string, although structures may be copied as a unit. The language does not define any storage allocation facility other than static definition and the stack discipline provided by the local variables of functions; there is no heap or garbage collection. All of these higher-level mechanisms must be provided by explicitly called functions. Most C implementations have included a reasonably standard collection of such functions.

Although the absence of some of these features may seem like a grave deficiency, (“You mean I have to call a function to compare two character strings?”), keeping the language down to modest size has real benefits. Since C is relatively small, it can be described in small space, and learned quickly. A programmer can reasonably expect to know and understand and indeed regularly use the entire language.

A lack of garbage collection in C is the most infamous of these deficits. Dr. Charles Severance (better known as Dr. Chuck) notes that:

The lack of garbage collection feature in C is both one of the great strengths of the language and at the same time is likely the reason that the average programmer will never develop or maintain a major C application during their career.

Even though these things were left out deliberately, they are more than just frustrating for the modern programmer. They can actually lead to security vulnerabilities and issues with system stability if not handled correctly. So there is a good reason C is being gradually replaced by other languages that came after it.

Why C

Despite the problems mentioned above, C turned out to be the perfect language for me to learn as my first language. Its educational value is unparalleled:

Almost all modern programming languages are directly or indirectly influenced by C, so learning C gives you a huge leg up if you want to be generally good at programming.
When you learn a “real life” language (that you will be using day to day) after learning C, you will be in a much better position to grasp the nuances of the said language.
Learning C helps to deeply understand how computers work under the hood.
Helps you learn good coding practices.

Let’s look at each of these points in more detail.

The mother of modern programming languages

C is the de facto lingua franca of programming languages. Due to the success and ubiquity of C, most programming languages today are either directly or indirectly inspired by it. The procedural, imperative style of C, with its curly braces, semicolons, and familiar control structures (if, for, while, switch), is the direct ancestor of the syntax used in a massive family of popular languages. The list of C-family programming languages contains over 70 programming languages that share significant features with it!

Here are some prominent modern programming languages that borrow aspects of C:

C++: A direct descendant of C (originally called “C with Classes”).
Java: Heavily borrowed C/C++ syntax to make it familiar to C programmers.
C#: Microsoft’s answer to Java. It adopted the C-family syntax that Java popularized but is built on its own .NET framework.
Go: A spiritual successor to C, developed at Google. It aims to capture C’s simplicity and performance for systems programming but modernizes it.
Rust: A modern systems language designed to be a “safer C.”
JavaScript: Adopted C-style syntax (curly braces, semicolons, for loops) to have a familiar feel.
PHP: A web-focused scripting language whose syntax is heavily modeled on C.
Swift: Apple’s successor to Objective-C (which is a strict superset of C). Swift can import any C library.

In addition, languages like Python and Ruby, which have a very different syntax from C, have their primary implementations written in C. This allows them to easily interface with high-performance libraries written in C.

Preparation for learning a “real” language

If you want to be a language-agnostic programmer, learning most languages becomes dramatically easier if you know C, as you can focus on their unique features (like classes in C++, the garbage collector in Java, or async/await in JavaScript) instead of wrestling with basic syntax.

While C is very much a “real” language used in critical systems, the spirit of this point is that it prepares you for the languages you’ll likely use for application development (e.g., C++, Java, C#, Go, Rust, JavaScript). Learning C first is like learning Latin to understand Romance languages; you grasp the roots from which so much has grown.

When you move from C to a language like Rust, you’ll have a profound appreciation for its “borrow checker” because you’ve personally experienced the memory-related bugs it prevents. When you use a garbage-collected language like Go or Java, you’ll understand the trade-offs being made — convenience at the cost of some performance overhead and non-deterministic cleanup — because you’ve had to manage memory manually. This deep context allows you to grasp the why behind a language’s design, not just the how of its syntax.

Seeing under the hood

Modern programming languages and frameworks are built on layers of abstraction designed to maximize developer productivity. While this is powerful, it can leave programmers with a fragile, incomplete mental model of how a computer actually works. C tears away these layers.

Direct memory management is the single most important concept C teaches. You are responsible for every byte of memory you allocate on the heap using malloc() and for releasing it with free(). Forgetting to free() memory leads to memory leaks. Using memory after it has been freed leads to crashes. This forces you to understand the fundamental difference between the stack (for local variables, managed automatically) and the heap (for dynamically allocated data, managed by you). This knowledge is invaluable for debugging complex performance issues in any language.

Pointers are arguably the most feared but also the most powerful feature in C. A pointer is simply a variable that holds a memory address. By using pointers, you are no longer working with abstract data but with the actual locations in memory where that data lives. This teaches you: how data is laid out in memory; the difference between passing data “by value” (a copy) and “by reference” (a pointer to the original); and how to build complex data structures like linked lists, trees, and hash tables from scratch, giving you a visceral understanding of how they work.

C is often called a “high-level assembly language.” It provides very little abstraction over the underlying hardware. When you are working with text (strings) in C, you are forced to consider how letters and words are stored in memory: each character in a string occupies a contiguous byte of memory, ending with a special character (the null-terminator) that signals the end of that string. When you are working with numbers, C forces you to think about how much space (in bytes) each number takes in memory, with different implications depending on how large you want the value of the number to be. When you work with arrays, you understand they are just contiguous blocks of memory. This proximity to the metal gives you an intuition for how your code will be executed by the CPU, making you a far more effective performance tuner and low-level debugger.

Internalizing good coding practices

Starting with a language that holds your hand can instill habits that are inefficient or unsafe in the long run. C, by contrast, has no safety net. It is a strict but fair teacher that forces you to become a disciplined, mindful programmer.

For example, in Python, you can create a list and append() to it indefinitely. The interpreter handles all the memory allocation, resizing, and garbage collection behind the scenes. This is convenient but hides the computational cost. A new programmer might not realize that appending to a list a million times could trigger multiple expensive reallocations and copies of the entire data structure.

To do the same in C, you must manage a dynamic array yourself. You have to track its size and capacity. When size equals capacity, you must allocate a new, larger block of memory with realloc(), copy the old data over, and free the old block. This process forces you to be mindful of resources from day one. You learn to think about efficiency not as a premature optimization but as a core part of writing good code.

In C, many standard library functions signal errors by returning NULL or -1. If you try to open a file and it doesn’t exist, fopen() returns NULL. If you don’t explicitly check for this NULL value and try to use the file pointer, your program will crash with a segmentation fault. This forces you into the habit of defensive programming: always check return values, anticipate failure modes, and handle errors gracefully. This is a hallmark of professional, production-ready code that is often neglected when a language’s exception-handling system makes it easy to be lazy.

Because nothing is done for you automatically, every line of C code is more deliberate. You choose unsigned int over int for a reason. You decide whether a function parameter should be a pointer or a copy. This constant need to make low-level decisions builds a powerful mental muscle, leading to code that is more precise, efficient, and intentional, regardless of the language you ultimately work in.

Conclusion

In conclusion, while you may not write C every day in a web or mobile development job, the lessons it imparts are universal and timeless. Learning C is an investment in your fundamental understanding of computation itself. It makes you a better problem-solver, a more insightful debugger, and a more disciplined engineer — the kind of programmer who doesn’t just know how to use a tool but understands how the tool works.