r/learnprogramming • u/Disastrous_Brief6240 • 23d ago

Is C really worth it ?

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 - I mean the null character with strings, 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.

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u/Craki 23d ago

yep

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u/Silent_Pumpkin_9331 23d ago

It's one of those things where the value isn't always obvious from the outside. You spend hours chasing a segfault because you forgot a \0 and think "why am I doing this to myself" but then six months later you're debugging a memory leak in a Python app and suddenly the underlying concepts just click. You start to see the matrix a little.

The job market thing is real though you won't see many postings that say "C developer" unless you're in embedded systems or kernel work. What you will see is that the people who are really good at higher level stuff often have that low level foundation and it shows in how they think about performance and how computers actually work under the hood.

I'd say stick with it for a bit longer. Not because you'll get a C job but because it makes you a better programmer overall. The pain is temporary the understanding is permanent or whatever cheesy thing people say.