Probably aboard the "hate on C" hype train. If you are curious, it could make sense to not let it get in your way, and continue investigating / learning. There's a lot to be gained from such an exercise.

FWIW if you're looking for practical projects; part III of https://craftinginterpreters.com/contents.html is in C, and if you're interested in graphics stuff SDL is really fun. It all runs in the web / browser too with Webassembly.

Oh cool, that's really neat! Thank you for sharing

Who knows? Maybe I'm a C greybeard and the culture I worked in was one where you can laugh at yourself and your work without feeling like everything has to be so serious all the time.

Refusing to explain in-jokes, even when explicitly asked, is exclusionary and insular, and leads to low influx of new people, resulting in a slow death of a community. A culture, if it wants to survive, must share itself freely to new potential members.

Humor doesn't have to be obvious to be good; and a magician doesn't have to ever give away the secrets of their illusions, no matter how loudly their audience cries out.

But I'm terribly sorry if you didn't get it. Just a simple play on words. It's certainly not insular or community destroying - an accusation like that is simply hyperbolic. Perhaps like most living things, growth only comes when there's opportunity to being tested and stressed.

I took it as "contradiction in terms", you can't be modern and C (incidentally, I love C)

Ah I see! Thank you

Explaining jokes usually ruins them.

Not when it causes integer underflow.

Integer underflow is undefined behaviour. The joke could be funny, it could be lacking in humour, or daemons might fly out of your nose (for added jocular expressiveness). Anything can happen with undefined behaviour.