&gt;The first rule of C is don&#x27;t write C if you can avoid it.<p>Man, this is just lame. C is a really nice, useful language, especially if you learn the internals. It requires discipline and care to use effectively, but it can be done right. The problem is that a lot of C programmers only know C and can&#x27;t apply higher level concepts or abstractions to it because they&#x27;ve never learned anything else. This makes their code harder to maintain and easier to break.