> In my university, back in the mid-90's teaching C was already seen as outdated.
Given the examples that follow it seems more of an ideological stance that a practical one. C is dead so let's teach Pascal, Lisp, MIPS assembly and Smalltalk?
From a language theory standpoint C is pretty clunky but in terms of getting stuff done it's still one of the most mainstream languages out there.
>having learned C++, any student would be able to downgrade themselves into C level on per-case basis.
That's sort of how I learned C in the first place where I see where you're coming from but I don't think that's good general advice. "Don't learn C, learn C++ and figure it out from there" is sort of like saying "Don't learn Italian, learn Latin and figure it out from there". C++ is a beast of a language, if people are interested in C they should learn C.
>C only became industry relevant thanks to the widespread of UNIX clones, and in platforms like ChromeOS, Windows, Android, its relevance is slowly fading away.
I sort of agree but I'm more of a glass half full type of guy, I think C is less relevant not because it's fading away but because other languages are taking a lot more space nowadays. What used to be considered "scripting languages" are commonly used to build complex applications because we have a lot more RAM and processing power than we used to. Still, kernels and low level code are still commonly written in C or, sometimes, C++ because you need good performance and/or tight control over the application.
Given the examples that follow it seems more of an ideological stance that a practical one. C is dead so let's teach Pascal, Lisp, MIPS assembly and Smalltalk?
From a language theory standpoint C is pretty clunky but in terms of getting stuff done it's still one of the most mainstream languages out there.
>having learned C++, any student would be able to downgrade themselves into C level on per-case basis.
That's sort of how I learned C in the first place where I see where you're coming from but I don't think that's good general advice. "Don't learn C, learn C++ and figure it out from there" is sort of like saying "Don't learn Italian, learn Latin and figure it out from there". C++ is a beast of a language, if people are interested in C they should learn C.
>C only became industry relevant thanks to the widespread of UNIX clones, and in platforms like ChromeOS, Windows, Android, its relevance is slowly fading away.
I sort of agree but I'm more of a glass half full type of guy, I think C is less relevant not because it's fading away but because other languages are taking a lot more space nowadays. What used to be considered "scripting languages" are commonly used to build complex applications because we have a lot more RAM and processing power than we used to. Still, kernels and low level code are still commonly written in C or, sometimes, C++ because you need good performance and/or tight control over the application.