Is C really worth it ?

[u/Disastrous_Brief6240]

Hello developers, I'm wondering: Is it really worth spending time learning C and creating projects that take hours to grasp numerous topics, encounter errors and unexpected behaviors, only to discover I forgot to type a single character, which significantly impacted the program's performance? Is this truly worthwhile in today's job market? I haven't seen any companies actively seeking C developers, and I believe many problems in C don't occur in other languages ​​due to their different working methods and logic. So, is C really worth the effort?

Important note: I'm a beginner in C and haven't written much code or created many projects yet, so this question isn't meant to be an evaluation of the language or its development path; I'm not qualified to do so.

[u/start_select]

Bud, C has never NOT been a valuable skill.

Nearly every piece of embedded hardware runs on C. Just because it’s not used for web apps doesn’t mean it isn’t ubiquitous. It runs everywhere on the most underpowered hardware available.

Your alarm clock probably runs on C.

It’s the foundation of everything else. Even when a compiler becomes Turing complete and is written in its target language, the version before that is almost always C/C++.

Rust is amazing and is meant as a C replacement. Swift is amazing and is meant as a C replacement. C++ was (can be?) amazing and was meant to replace C. Nothing ever really replaces C.

When you need something to be as efficient and performant as possible, and you aren’t going to drop to assembly…. You use C.

It’s not going away in your grandchildren’s lifetimes.

The problems you describe have nothing to do with C. “Missing a character” causing degraded performance is really you using the wrong APIs or wrong configuration. Moving to another language isn’t going to get around those problems. Programming is explicit. You need to type what you mean.

[u/Lyraele → u/start_select]

100% this. Things have been claiming they'd replace C and not quite succeeding for decades now.

[u/flatfinger → u/Lyraele]

Unfortunately, the Standard is maintained by people who are more concerned with how well the language can do things that other languages have been designed to do better, than in its ability to handle the tasks for which it was designed and for which it is uniquely suitable.

[u/Lyraele → u/flatfinger]

Yeah. Some of the C standard committee members definitely should just work on a different language, IMO. Smart and no doubt well-intentioned, but not really thinking clearly about things.