On: Lisp and Smalltalk are dead: It’s C all the way down

[defunkt]

Except I never learned C the first time. That's the point.

[cema → defunkt]

So you did not learn it, but you were learning it. Maybe you could not write a good working program in C, but you became aware of a number of concepts that you could build on later when learning other languages and when learning C the second time.