When I came to learn C, I was already quite an expert in Turbo Pascal, version 6.0 by then.
Comparing C to Turbo Pascal 6.0 in terms of features and safety just felt like "meh!".
Thankfully I got someone that around the same time gave me a copy of Turbo C++ 1.0 and I learned how to get some of the Turbo Pascal features back, while having the C portability and joined the C++ ranks for a few years.
THEN, I got a copy of TC++ a few months or a year later. WTF?!?
The light came on when I read Scott Meyer's "Effective C++" book in 96 or so. "Effective" meant "not stepping on one of 50 or so common land mines". I realized what a bad joke C++ was, and decided never to go back to it.
C is useful as a substitute for assembler, but not most applications. Too bad we didn't get to see more of Smalltalk in school in the 80s. And maybe Scheme instead of just a little bit of Lisp.
Why were we programming in (little more than) assembler as our main language???