Well... While coding mostly in Python, I am still a programmer. I am only using a more refined tool more adequate to my needs than C would ever be.

Obviously, I disagree with the "C programmers have to be masochists" view of the article. C is powerful and can be cruel and unforgiving, but once you get it (and it's not that hard), you can appreciate how powerful it really is.

As for the pain of going from interactive-prompt-nirvana to edit-compile-link-run-wonderwtf-reboot hell, it took me years to learn C++ because I was introduced to OOP in Smalltalk and then wrote some stuff in Actor. C++ most definitely, did not look like a step in the right direction. In fact, it wasn't.

For years, I used the following tagline in my BBS messages:

"Hello World in Assembly: 30 bytes, Hello World in Turbo Pascal: 10K, Hello World in C: STACK-OVERFLOW: SYSTEM HALTED"