I certainly agree that learning C illustrates some extremely useful compsci principles. I also believe you can be a wizard at solving computational problems with very little practical programming experience - I met many such algorithms phds in my failed journey to become an algorithms phd. That being said, I made this comment because the title of the post is "The 75% answer to all newbie questions" C is not a language that a newbie who needs a 75% answer is going to do well with! There's a reason they don't use C for CS1.