Umm yes, yes people do. Thankfully. I like C. Learn string handling and pointers, go through https://wiki.sei.cmu.edu/confluence/display/c/SEI+CERT+C+Cod... and you will write relatively safe programs. Oh, and read the man pages.

I do not know who was against man pages, but God, man pages are a God-send. It must stay. I never liked info though.

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In any case, I write in Forth, Ada, Go, and JavaScript (Vue.js). Not much C these days. If someone asks me a simple program to write to extract data from a format specified by him, C is what I would choose; mainly: structs. I could do it in Forth, but easier in C, he has GCC, I can create a binary easily, etc.