The other day Neel Krishnaswami mentioned that he’s going to be teaching the C class at Cambridge in the fall, and asked if I had any advice about that topic. Of course I do! In fact the response got so long that it ended up being a blog post. My main idea is that we need to teach C in a way that helps students understand why a very large fraction of critical software infrastructure, including almost all operating systems and embedded systems, is written in C, while also acknowledging the disast...