I don’t think that’s what they’re saying. They’re saying that there is utility in understanding what you’re getting with a memory-safe language like Rust. Why would a programmer care if they’re getting memory safety and thread safety if they don’t know what unsafeness looks like? It’s the same reason we teach history in school; knowing where we came from gives us a better perspective of where we are today.
They can read the Rustonomicon. Done. They can also write C or Unsafe Rust in order to learn about what regular Rust gives them.
But none of that is an argument for learning C and then stumbling into a safer language after doing that, since then you have to learn (say) Rust as well as unlearn your C (or whatever unsafe language habits) as well.[1]
>It’s the same reason we teach history in school; knowing where we came from gives us a better perspective of where we are today.
What we learn from history is mostly "holy shit that was fucking awful thank god we stopped doing that!". Except for programmers it seems. I have no objection to learning or using C but we don't ride horse caravans around anymore.
