[mywittyname]

Your argument seems more in the vein of "C programmers are smarter java programmers" while ignoring the actual discussion, which is C is not a good teaching language. Yeah, you'll learn some stuff by virtue of blindly running over the language's landmines. I don't consider trial by fire to be a great way to learn.

> It's things like understanding how an array of ints is laid out in memory and what happens when you treat it as an array of chars instead.

This is one of said landmines, as the size of both is architecture/compiler specific. The only thing you learn by stepping on this one is, "use fixed-width integers when you care about exactly how many bytes the value is."