[kibwen]

> Those are all vastly more complicated than C.

C's simplicity is an illusion. The vast quantity of footguns and edge cases make writing correct C extremely complicated.

> And on top of that you have to learn three instead of just one!

You don't need to learn all of those, select one based on what your goals are. And it's not like gaining a surface-level understanding of any of these programming languages would take more than a week to a month anyway.

> Imagine trying to learn Rust without experience with C. Oh man.

It's quite the opposite. Rust is a dream to learn compared to C. The Rust compiler is like having a personal tutor at your beck and call to teach you systems programming best-practices. Without exaggeration, these days I would not suggest someone start learning C until they have learned Rust.

[sseagull]

They aren’t necessarily advocating learning C so that they can write lots of production code in C. They are advocating learning C to better understand lower layers of programming.

The basics of C are easy and illustrative. And given that the main Python interpreter is written in C, can be helpful to know.