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SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Industry standard
C is the industry standard programming language, moreover, it is the most popular programming language to use. C is the language used for most Windows, UNIX and Mac operating systems.
Pro Understanding of computers
Learning C forces you to grapple with the low-level workings of your computer (memory management, pointers, etc.) in ways that the other languages abstract away. Without an understanding of these low-level aspects of computer programming you will be limited if you try to develop an application that needs to run in a memory or performance constrained environment.
Other languages like Python can obscure a lot of details, so your foundation may be weaker.
Pro Teaches good practices
Writing in C will require you to understand how things are done. C implies using and understanding the fundamentals. Learning a higher-level language after is much easier.
Pro Foundational, difficult but important
Learning C will teach valuable skills and transferrable understanding of computing. While learning a scripting language may be easier, students will not understand system constraints and performance problems, nor what features like garbage collection are actually doing in other languages.
Pro Ubiquitous
There is a C compiler available for probably every computer system in existence today.
Pro Portability
C is portable between most hardware. Generally a C compiler is made for any new architecture, and already exists for existing architectures.
C is portable between all operating systems (Windows, UNIX and Mac) and only needs a program to be recompiled to work. This allows anyone on any operating system to learn about the language and not be held back by intricacies of their operating system.
With this said, C's portability these days is not quite what it used to be. Much of said portability relies on the POSIX standard in particular, and as time passes, the compliance of a given system with that standard is becoming less certain; especially in the case of Linux. Most things will still be portable (or at least emulatable) between Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD for example; but you will at times need to make use of platform-specific support libraries for certain individual cases, as well.
Pro Must-have
Capability to program in C is greatly appreciated in developers, creates an image of competency, and many programmers will learn it at some point in their careers.
Pro If you can't grok C you should not be a professional programmer
It sets an early bar that if you can't hurdle you might as well do something other than programming and not waste any more of your time.
Pro Low level of abstraction
While higher level languages languages like Java and Python provide possibilities to be "more expressive" per line of code, it's much more convenient to start with "less efficient" (get me right) language, in order to get initial concepts of how things behave at lower level.
Actually C is a good starting point moving to both higher and lower levels of abstraction, the good example here would be learning C before Assembler, as for general use the Assembler quite hard to understand due to low level of its abstraction (like getting the understanding on how loops work in C before trying to implement them on Assembler).
Pro C is simple with lesser rules than any other language
C is standardized and it is the go to language when you have to speed things up.
Pro Portable between CPU architectures
C was designed to be independent of any particular machine architecture, and so with a little care, it is easy to write "portable" programs (see here). By design, C provides constructs that map efficiently to typical machine instructions, and therefore it has found lasting use in applications that had formerly been coded in assembly language like operating systems or small embedded systems.
Pro Basic concepts can be applied to accelerate learning any other language
You can easily pivot knowledge learned here and apply it to almost every other language.
Pro Easy to drop down to assembly
Sometimes you really need to program directly in assembly. C’s ABI and common compiler extensions make this a piece of cake.
Pro Portable
C is portable between most hardware. Generally a C compiler is made for any new architecture, and already exists for existing architectures.
C is portable between all operating systems (Windows, UNIX, Mac, etc.) and only needs a program to be recompiled to work. This allows anyone on any operating system to learn about the language and not be held back by intricacies of their operating system.
With this said, C's portability these days is not quite what it used to be. Much of said portability relies on the POSIX standard in particular, and as time passes, the compliance of a given system with that standard is becoming less certain; especially in the case of Linux. Most things will still be portable (or at least emulatable) between Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD for example; but you will at times need to make use of platform-specific support libraries and APIs as well.
Pro The king of languages, imitated, extended but never equalled
Made of a small set of keywords and rules, only your imagination is the limit. Above all, when it comes to 'pro' programming, C is the only one to rely on.
Pro Helps with learning other languages later
A lot of languages used in the industry have a C-like syntax (C++, Java, Javascript, C#, PHP) and starting with C will help new developers to be familiar with it's syntax and by extensions with the syntax of many popular languages.
Pro Easy to drop down to assembly.
Sometimes you really need to program directly in assembly. C’s ABI and common compiler extensions make this a piece of cake.
Pro Backwards compatible
I have code written 2 or 3 decades ago that still compiles and runs just fine. If you do it right in C, you will probably be able to use that code your whole career.
Pro Has object oriented programming, generics, etc..
Not right out the box all of the time, but every good C programmer knows how to create just about everything they need to get the job done. There are books written about making OOP in C, and _Generic was added in C11.
Read how to do stuff. The language takes maybe a day to learn, but there are decades of tools and concepts laying around. This is because it can do everything, and works pretty much anywhere electronic, and the C standard committee aims to keep it that way.
Cons
Con Other languages can do it easier or better
There are languages like Rust, Object Pascal, D, Golang, Vlang, Odin, Zig, Jai, etc... that can be used instead. The other languages are easier to understand, use, and/or about as fast.
Con Requires memory management
Learning programming is already hard enough when you don't have to worry about memory leaks.
Con Lack of support for first class strings
C does not support the string type, nor does it support UTF-8 strings that modern languages are employing today. Instead of strings, C makes use of the *char type which is a pointer to a character array.
Con Languages is full of corner cases and undefined behaviors
Undefined behavior in a program can cause unexpected results, making it hard to debug. With UB, program behavior may vary wildly depending on optimization settings. There are many cases that invoke UB, such as signed overflow, invalid dereferences, large integer shifts, uninitialized variables, etc. These serve to frustrate novice programmers when they could be learning other concepts.
Con Undefined behaviors and weak limited type safety
Subtle errors can render the entire program "undefined" by the complicated C standard. The standard imposes no requirements in such cases. Thus C compiler is free to ignore the existence of such cases and Bad Things are prone to happen instead. Even experts can't reliably avoid undefined cases in C, so how can beginners be expected to do so? C allows for non-type safe operations such as logic errors, wild pointers, buffer overflow, etc. UB and type safety issues create a large number of bugs and security vulnerabilities.
Con Completely lacks type safety
The C standard library is not type safe, and the language itself does not promote type safety built into the language, which leads to error-proneness of the language. If anything, it would be recommended that those interested in C to instead put their time in D, which actually includes a complete copy of the C standard library rewritten to be fully type safe.
Con Does not support modules; header file annoyances
Modules save programmer time. Some programming languages make use of modules which eliminate the need for C includes and header files.
Modules only have to be compiled once, and when importing those modules into your software project, you only have to pull in the module that you are using, which is often times already precompiled. This way, the compiler knows exactly what it needs before beginning to compile your project and can automatically compile the few dependencies it needs in advance.
Con Long learning curve
While the language compliments knowledge of computer components very well, and gives a deeper understanding, it is also quite difficult to learn, and to use correctly, especially without aforementioned knowledge.
Con Dated programming concepts
C lacks built in versions of a large majority of programming concepts that other languages make use of today.
Con The need for C developers in the current market is for engineering
It is the language of choice for embedded programming. But computer science, information technology, and software engineering programs often do not teach C. It is electrical engineering and computer engineering that do. So expect to learn how a computer works to get work done.
Con Hard to maintain older software projects due to lack of testing practices
Older C code is not inspired by test driven development. So setting up old code bases to be properly tested for bugs can be more of a chore than it is worth.
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