Learn C

Was there any study done to the (un)reliability of C? I know for a fact practically every piece software I use is programmed in either C or C++.

The sole exceptions are Anki and Gentoo's portage system, both Python. And I'm pretty sure the reason portage is so extremely slow is because it is in Python (I've checked, it's not I/O-bound). And Anki is some very unreliable software.

In fact, give me a single big desktop software project made with a language that is not C or C++.

For anyone who hasn't browsed through Peter Seibel's "Coders at Work," one of his subjects is Fran Allen...it's kind of funny because I do agree that learning C has been valuable to the high-level programming I do today (but only because I was forced to learn it in school). But there's always another level below you that can be valuable...Allen says C killed her interest in programming...not because it was hard, but because of, in her opinion, it led engineers to abandon work in compiler optimization (her focus was in high-performance computing):

(Excerpted from: Peter Seibel. Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming (Kindle Location 6269). Kindle Edition: http://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Programm... )

Seibel: When do you think was the last time that you programmed?

Allen: Oh, it was quite a while ago. I kind of stopped when C came out. That was a big blow. We were making so much good progress on optimizations and transformations. We were getting rid of just one nice problem after another. When C came out, at one of the SIGPLAN compiler conferences, there was a debate between Steve Johnson from Bell Labs, who was supporting C, and one of our people, Bill Harrison, who was working on a project that I had at that time supporting automatic optimization...The nubbin of the debate was Steve's defense of not having to build optimizers anymore because the programmer would take care of it. That it was really a programmer's issue....

Seibel: Do you think C is a reasonable language if they had restricted its use to operating-system kernels?

Allen: Oh, yeah. That would have been fine. And, in fact, you need to have something like that, something where experts can really fine-tune without big bottlenecks because those are key problems to solve. By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are ... basically not taught much anymore in the colleges and universities.

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While I certainly agree that understanding the "how" will give you a better appreciation of the "what" and a more thorough understanding of the "why" behind many languages (I was one of the obnoxiously vocal detractors when American universities overwhelmingly moved from C/C++ to Java), I think this goes a little far:

When you internalize these lessons, your approach to programming will completely change.

You can know which parts of a language are heavier without knowing how they're implemented. Granted, this is certainly not the same, but in a practical sense it is certainly close. Your approach to programming will only "completely change" if you've been doing things with absolutely no understanding of the performance impact of the choices you make.

There are certainly people in that situation, but anyone who has had to do any profiling to find bottlenecks in code (which I would guess means most people who have been involved in professional development for more than a year or two) likely has at least an idea of which data and control structures are going to cause issues in languages they've used at length.

So yes, I agree that understanding what's going on is good... but not everyone has the time or inclination to delve into the depths of C, and there are other ways to come about a useful understanding of language internals (e.g. actually reading about a language's specific features rather than simply guessing at their implementation based on the assumption that they're written using standard C idioms).

There is a difference. The difference between someone who works as a programmer, who takes it just as a job but of course can be extremely good at it - just like anything else you practice a lot; and someone who is a programmer. They are lexically the same but they mean different things. The last one, beside working (or not) as a programmer, does it for the art of it. Who not necessarily learns or does something (ships) because it's needed or it provides anything else beside the joy and fulfilment of learning and understanding it. For example, at work, when you want to stop programming you open your own personal open source project and relax for an hour with it. Then you go home after 8 hours of programming and start up your IDE and carry on with your art that may or may not ever see the light of day and it makes no difference.