The Languages I Was Scared Of

There’s a pattern I’ve noticed in my own learning. There are things in the back of my mind that bug me, things I know some better version of me would understand, that also scare me enough that I keep pushing them back. “I’ll learn it later.” “Do I even need this?” “I know enough already.” C was exactly this.

I first met its brother C++ as a teenager building Arduino-powered smart lights. I was 15, I had barely written any code, and I had real difficulty translating what I wanted into something the compiler would accept. I gave up on a lot of those early IoT projects and pegged the problem as “C++ is too low-level for me.” That sentence stuck around for years. It became a small permission slip I’d hand myself every time a C or C++ project showed up: not for me, reach for Python.

Fast forward through a CS degree and a stack of projects, and the diagnosis was obviously wrong. The teenager who couldn’t get an Arduino to do what he wanted didn’t have a language problem. He had a fundamentals problem. He didn’t know how memory worked, how to decompose a problem into something a computer could chew on, how to think in terms of state and side effects. C++ wasn’t the issue. The issue was that I was trying to write code before I understood what code was doing.

But the fear had already done its work. Even after the fundamentals were there, the avoidance lingered. I’d notice myself reaching past anything that smelled like pointers, even when I was technically equipped to handle it.

What finally moved me wasn’t a clean realization. It was just building things I’d previously thought I couldn’t. Glitchy was the big one. A working compiler that I wrote by hand, without leaning on AI to do the thinking for me. After that, the shape of what felt possible started shifting. If I could write a recursive descent parser and a semantic analyzer, the gap between me and “person who writes C” was a lot smaller than my teenage self had decided.

The actual catalyst was almost mundane. I had plugged Redis into my therapy booking platform and watched response times collapse from a simple caching layer. I kept thinking about it. How is this thing so fast? The honest answer was that I didn’t really know, and I wasn’t going to know until I tried to build something like it. So I did. A month later I had dist-KV, a Redis-compatible KV store in C that handles 1.8M+ requests per second and outruns Redis itself by 2-2.4x on the commands I implemented.

The point of writing this is not that I beat my fear of C. The point is that the fear was never really about C. It was about a fifteen-year-old’s verdict on what he was capable of, dressed up as a technical opinion and carried forward for years. Most of the things I’ve been avoiding probably have the same shape. The way out is just to build the thing.