If a programmer can't at least read (normal) C, I'd doubt they're a fully qualified programmer. (Just my way of viewing things, I might be wrong. My reasoning is that if you don't know C and pointers, you probably don't know what a simple line like 'foo = bar + "abc"' even entails.)

It's a tiny language, has easy syntax, and "undefined" behavior (which you don't normally run into) exists for a reason -- e.g. to avoid having to check for unlikely cases every time a heavily used function (e.g. memcpy) is called.