Should .NET developers *really* be spending time learning C for low-level exposure? [closed]

Question

When Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood began the disagreement in their podcast over whether programmers should learn C, regardless of their industry and platform of delivery, it sparkled quite an explosive debate within the developer community that probably still rages amongst certain groups today. I have been reading a number of passages from a number of programmer bloggers with their take on the matter. The arguments from both sides certainly carry weight, both what I did not find is a perspective that is uniquely angled from the standpoint of developers focused on just the .NET Framework. Practically all of them were commenting on a general programmer standpoint.

What am I trying to get at? Recall Jeff Atwood's opinion that most of the time developers at such high levels would spend would be on learning the business/domain, on top of whatever is needed to learn the technologies to achieve those domain requirements. In my working experience that is a very accurate description of the work life of many. Now supposing that .NET developers can fork the time for "extra curricular" learning, should that be C?

For the record, I have learnt C back in school myself, and I can absolutely understand and appreciate what the proponents are reasoning for. But, when thinking things through, I personally feel .NET developers should not dive straight into C. Because, the thing I wish more developers would take some time to learn is - MSIL and CLR.

Maybe I am stuck with the an unusual bunch of colleagues, I don't know, but it seems to me many people do not keep a conscious awareness that their C# or VB code compiles in IL first before JIT comes in and makes it raw machine code. Most do not know IL, and have no interest in how exactly the CLR handles the code they write. Reading Jeffrey Richter's CLR via C# was quite a shocker for me in so many areas; glad I read it despite colleagues dismissing it as "too low level". I am no expert in IL but with knowledge of the basics, I found myself following his text easier as I was already familiar with the stack behaviour of IL. I find myself disassembling assemblies to have a look at how the IL turns out when I write certain code.

I learn the CLR and MSIL because I know that is the direct layer below me. The layer that allows me to carry out my own layer of work. C, is actually further down. Closer to our "reality" is the CLR and MSIL. That is why I would recommend others to have a go at those, because I do not see enough folks delving at that layer. Or, is your team already all conversant with MSIL?

Answer 1

Of course you should. The greatest way to become overly specialized and single-minded (and, correspondingly, have limited marketable skills) is to only work with a single type of language and eschew all others as "not related to your current task."

Every programmer should have some experience with a modern JIT'd OO language (C#/Java), a lower-level simpler language (C, FORTRAN, etc), a very high level interpreted language (Python, Ruby, etc), and a functional language (Scheme, Lisp, Haskell, etc). Even if you don't use all of them on a day-to-day basis, the broadening of your thought process that such knowledge grants is quite useful.

Answer 2

I already know C and that helped me during the 1.1 days where there are a lot of things that are not yet in the .NET base libraries and I have to P/Invoke something from the Platform SDK.

My take is that we should always allocate a time for learning something that we don't know yet. To answer your question, I don't think it is essential for you to learn C but if you have some time to spare, C is a good language to learn and is just as valid as any other language out there.