C is useful but its more brain damaged than BASIC and terrible for pedagogy. The compiler confuses lexical analysis and parsing, strings are confused with arrays, arrays are confused with pointers, etc. Beginners who screw around with C are just going to get more confused.<p>It was a "minimum viable language" that bridged minicomputers and microcomputers in the 1980s but it is a disaster that we're still using it today.<p>Unfortunately people are using worse assemblers than they did back in the day. Gas is just awful, it is just meant to work closely with gcc, not enjoy writing assembly like we did with MASM and Turbo Assembler back in the day, never famous Macro Assembler for System/360.