[tester756]

Is going from high level to low level somehow worse?

I went from very high level (C# web and even webassembly) to C

and while I believe I learned a lot and my understanding of computers improved,

then I think the biggest lesson is that one of the most important programming ecosystems (C) is a very messy and painful.

Not because it must be painful, but because of decisions made decades ago, maybe some inertia, maybe backward compatibility, maybe culture, who knows?

Low quality compiler messages, ecosystem fragmentation, terrible standard lib (where are my basic datastructures), memory management being minefield, etc.

[edgyquant]

C gets a bad wrap because there are now alternatives built by finding solutions to problems we only know because of Cs existence. Compiler messages, standard library and memory management are all things we can agree are terrible now days but when C came out it was a huge improvement over the norms before. Also it’s important to remember even “big” things like Unix were at one point just a few thousand lines of code.