Programming boils down to paying attention to details. C is an extremely small, simple, predictable and malleable [] language that makes you painfully aware of that fact. For me, it is a pleasure to read well-written C code, for example the NetBSD kernel. There's a lot to learn there about elegance and good design.

[] malleable in the sense of bottom-up programming and defining your own "vocabularies". When I develop in C (and C++) I usually solve the problems 75% bottom-up and 25% top-down. With bottom-up approach, it is easy to stay focused at the problem at hand and write mostly bug-free code. The "top-down" bits just put pieces of the puzzle together.