[0xbadcafebee]

I agree that the complexities of C will add to the challenge and workload and make the project take much longer. But certain aspects of C can raise interesting questions that you might not face otherwise. Some of those things will be about algorithm design, some about language design, some about computing in general. Especially if you spend most of your time in high-level languages, it can really help to have this new perspective. Some of it makes you question modern software development.

Also, I learned a lot more about C (and computing in general) by working on complicated projects rather than simple ones. I had built all sorts of simple C projects, but one complicated one taught me twice as much as I'd previously learned. It took me a long time, but it was all valuable because I got to learn what designs didn't work for C and which did.

Anyway, it's up to the reader to decide how much of their time to invest and what they want to get out of it. If you don't want to write it in C, don't, but I personally think the incidental lessons are some of the most valuable.

[iainmerrick]

Agreed -- writing toy programs generally doesn't teach you a whole lot about a new programming language. To learn it in a deep way you need to use it properly, on real problems.

Although, if you're mainly interested in getting something done rather than using it as a learning experience, using an unfamiliar language is probably a bad idea. You'll learn a lot about a new language, but you probably won't build anything you could actually ship.