What is an example in which knowing C will make me write better code in any other language?

Question

In the Stack Overflow podcasts, Joel Spolsky constantly harps on Jeff Atwood about Jeff not knowing how to write code in C. His statement is that \"knowing C helps you write bet

Answer 1

Technically, all of the deficiencies of C would force you to code around them; making you write more code -> making you more experienced in general. Lacking any portable integer bigger than 32-bits, for example, C has, in the past, made me write my own bignum library.

The lack of implicit memory, resource and error management (garbage collection, RAII, automatically-called constructors/destructors, maybe exceptions) force C users to write a lot of initialization, error-handling and cleanup code. It may just be me, but I'm never tired of writing such code. I go and read the documentation of every external function I call, return to my code and check for every return value and other failure-indicative stuff. It even makes me feel safe!

This last point is probably the biggest one to be made in favor of the argument. You can only write so many malloc()/free() pairs before you start to analyze the lifetime of every single variable you come across in every single language! C++'s automatic-storage objects don't help this disorder, either.

Writing truly portable C code often requires the programmer to be free of a lot assumptions about the host system - think sizeof(), CHAR___BITS, unsigned long, UINT_MAX. While this hasn't helped me write better code in other languages, it has helped me think about possible alternate implementations: how a tiny microprocessor could still run my C code, generating a gazillion RISC instructions for my simple one-line statement. (That is another thing; not many other languages map to and from a given assembly language so easily in my head. Then again, that may just be me.)

Of course, none of these arguments go only for C. @S.Lott has a valid point - Fortran might be an equally good alternative. But there is so much C code around! A whole personal computer system from top to bottom -applications to libraries to drivers to kernel- is available in source code in C. It would be such a waste if you could not read it.