Learn C

The Ada way of doing things really is a whole other world with completely different goals in mind than what fanboys and fangirls (I'm using the term dismissively, but there are real problems with new languages) will tell you about the new language they're using that was thrown together last weekend. Ada, of course, is far from perfect, but the blemishes like unbounded string syntax (I hope to see that fixed next revision! Ada just had a new revision!) are not enough to put me off from all the safety and checking the language does for me.

I must tell you that it was the winner of a DoD contest to create a kind of perfect language. There was a document called the Steelman that outlined everything the DoD's perfectly readable, maintainable, reliable, safe language would look like. Three of the four entries were Pascal-derived, not C!

If there is one thing Ada will do for you, if you let it, is demolish your ego. Every stupid thing you do will be caught by the compiler and you will scorned. The compiler will piss and moan catch all sorts of fantastic errors that you'd have to pop into a debugger for in C. Some folks have this notion that they are infallible, but "to err is human", right? You're welcome to turn off the checks in specific instances or project-wide (if you're nuts), but this isn't me. I'd love to think it is—and I write pretty great Ada these days—and I still don't have the gaul to turn off compiler checks.

Everything isn't a pointer in Ada, we can nest functions. Hell we nest packages and do sorts of things that just don't translate to Java, C++ or C, but now I'm just rambling.

I think Ada is a great choice for anything more than a shell script. Learning it introduces you more to a software engineering mindset because the language is built for software engineering, not hacking something together— though, in time, you will be capable of it. It's not the change of mindset like switching from procedural to functional, but it may be just as enlightening.

In the beginning she was complaining a lot about the language's verbosity, but with the time she spent on the project she eventually became an Ada advocate! :)

C absolutely is that bad. It is poorly defined. It forces programmers to explicitly write out things that can and should be done automatically. There is no standard error-handling system, just conventions involving return values and global error flags; there is no error-recovery system at all. Something as seemingly simple as computing the average of two signed integers winds up being non-trivial. C++ is even worse, as not only does it inherit most of the problems with C, but it introduces an entirely new list of pointless problems. Debugging code written in these languages is needlessly difficult -- you are spending as much time on high-level problems (i.e. design problems) as you are on tracing pointers and figuring out where some uninitialized value became a problem. It is not unreasonable to estimate that the dominance of C and C++ carry the cost of billions of dollars spent dealing with the headaches caused by these languages' problems.

It is hard to come up with a list of technical advantages to counter the above. C has few features, and those features are not very powerful. All that C really has going for it is that you can be "close to the machine," though it should be clear that other languages let you do this too (since other languages have been used to implement entire OSes). C++ has a few technical features that may be advantageous -- but they all compose poorly with each other, and their value is weighed down by all the baggage C++ carried from C (and indeed, most of the really bizarre bugs you can make in C++ stem from this baggage).

The non-technical reasons for C being popular vastly outweigh the technical deficiency of the language. The reason C/C++ is "choice number one" for desktop software is almost entirely a result of those non-technical reasons.

Reminds me of arguments I used to get into with a friend. My friend was really into naming patterns and stuff. I really disliked that, and thought to give it a technobabble-ish name distances the practice from the concept itself, which is usually more straightforward than the name suggests. I don't think your comment is the first thing I've read that steers me in the direction of "OOP as a buzzwordy name for preexisting, good, clean practices".