I always wanted to learn C but couldn't find a reason to really want to. During the pandemic I played a lot with TempleOS and HolyC, and that's how I learned lower-level concepts and C(ish) programming. Then I moved to playing with Zig and finally Rust (which I had tried before but was too much of a step up for me).
Learning C in general greatly improved me as a programmer, and I gained a much stronger understanding of higher-level languages and the systems around me.
Without playing around building demos and games in HolyC, I have no idea how -or even if- I would have learned lower-level software, something that I'd been so intimidated by previously. I've written a lot of Rust since then, and just the other day I wrote probably my first "production" C, an extension for SQLite :)
Learning C in general greatly improved me as a programmer, and I gained a much stronger understanding of higher-level languages and the systems around me.
Without playing around building demos and games in HolyC, I have no idea how -or even if- I would have learned lower-level software, something that I'd been so intimidated by previously. I've written a lot of Rust since then, and just the other day I wrote probably my first "production" C, an extension for SQLite :)