Should you learn C to “learn how the computer works”?
C doesn't necessarily teach you how computers work. But it does teach you how software works. Our modern software empire is built on mountains of C, and deference to C is pervasive throughout higher-level software design.>You may have heard another slogan when talking about C: “C is portable assembler.” If you think about this slogan for a minute, you’ll also find that if it’s true, C cannot be how the computer works: there are many kinds of different computers, with different architecturesAs with many things, this phrase is an approximation. C is a portable implementation of many useful behaviors which map reasonably closely to tasks commonly done on most instruction sets. C programmers rarely write assembly to optimize (usually to capture those arch-specific features which are unrepresentable in C), but programmers in other languages often reach for C to write the high-performance parts of their code. The same reason C programmers in the early days would reach for assembly is now the reason higher-level programmers reach for C.