I'm a pretty competent C programmer, but doing even fairly simple matrix programming in C is fiendishly hard not to screw up. When I was porting this code [1] to this [2], it took an absurdly long time to iron out all the bugs. And just look at the difference in verbosity and difficulty. Worst of all, C has no guard rails: it's so easy to think you have it right, only to realize much later (or not at all, frankly) that you're computing complete nonsense.

[1] https://github.com/JuliaLang/Microbenchmarks/blob/af3d18f7b3...

[2] https://github.com/JuliaLang/Microbenchmarks/blob/af3d18f7b3...