Where do these delusions even come from? I think a lot of people here would benefit from 6 months in a 'normal' company, the kind that employs the vast majority of programmers. Just for a bit of perspective.
I honestly don't get this attitude in our industry. Nobody tells a general practitioner, "Nah, you don't really need to know what comprises a living cell. You most likely won't even need to drop down to that level."
Just because you don't need to do any low level work, doesn't mean you shouldn't learn anything about it.
If you think most programmers who know Java, C#, Ruby or, Python have ever dropped down to C you're deluding yourself. And they never need to and not only that the majority of their performance problems come from poorly written SQL queries. And the rest come from poorly conceived loops.
As I said, go get a job in a normal company, open your eyes. Most job applications will not give you an advantage if you put the ability to drop down to C on your CV. Because they will never, ever, ever need it.
Probably from those of us who have found a working knowledge of C fairly useful in their careers?
I've been working for 24 years in software and I'd say that during most years I've written or read C sources. Some years it would be a lot, some years relatively little, but it's been a very useful skill for me.
I agree that relatively few people need to write C these days - but knowledge of it does, in my opinion, help quite a lot.
I've worked several years at a normal company. My group of dozens of software engineers codes overwhelmingly in C, with Python, Perl, Lua, and the occasional ML in support roles.
I think a lot of people here would benefit from 6 months in a 'normal' company, that employs the vast majority of programmers. There's so more to the universe than Rails, Django, and JQuery...
That is true. Most programmers will not need to write code in C. But they'll still be better and more versatile programmers if they know the language.
I agree, although I'm not sure C should be the top priority for someone that will never need to actually use it. There are lots of other things to learn and nowhere near enough time to learn them all.
Although learning C when you already know other languages is not particularly difficult.
If you had said 99.9% of programmers should not write C, I'd agree. But the reality is there's a lot of numb nuts out there, and you're going to need to fix their code. If you can't beat em, join em.
Also, C isn't a complicated language. Like any, it has faults and warts, but it's pretty damn elegant on the whole.
C++, on the other hand... don't get me started.