[ianai]

Trying c out with a known solid testing framework seems like a much more practical and useful way to start. Telling people to read a text wall before doing any practice at any task is a great setup for failure. Math doesn’t do that. Physics doesn’t do that. Chemistry doesn’t do that. Literature doesn’t do that. Philosophy doesn’t do that. Etc. and of those philosophy is almost the study of text walls. But the best philosophy courses tend to start with a Socratic dialogue which is basically live action philosophizing.

[kqr]

Well, we also have lots of historic evidence (nearly every application written in C ever) that traditional/intuitive teaching methods don't work for C.

All people have learned from the last 40 years of C is how to write ridiculously insecure applications.

Reading the standard may not be the optimal choice, or even the first choice, but common teaching methods are nearly guaranteed to produce crap results in the specific case of C programming.

[MaxBarraclough]

I broadly agree. More so than any other other language, you cannot produce a good C (or C++) programmer by try-it-and-see alone. It's vital to have a grasp of the way the language is defined.

Point of disagreement: no amount of C expertise makes a hand-written C codebase safe. Vulnerabilities and undefined behaviour are often found even in code written by top-flight C programmers.