Another issue with C being an allegedly good beginner language is strings. C is simply terrible at handling strings. Let's say I want to concatenate two strings:

    char *concat(char *p, char *q)
    {
        size_t plen = strlen(p);
        size_t qlen = strlen(q);
        char *r = (char*)malloc(plen + qlen + 1);
        assert(r);
        memcpy(r, p, plen);
        memcpy(r + plen, q, qlen + 1);
        return r;
    }

And never mind the issue of when to free() r. Contrast with D:

    string concat(string p, string q)
    {
        return p ~ q;
    }

P.S. Yes, I know about the potential overflow problem with `plen + qlen + 1`.