Is learning C really a must for a programmer?

Many have this opinion. Somehow, by doing manual memory management allocation and garbage mangement one would become a better programmer.

I have little experience in C mainly because I can write terser and more readable code in Racket or Haskell. However I'm willing to give C a try just to learn these lessons that everybody keeps talking.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that I already know most of what is there to know. Can you list some useful lessons that a typical high level code dweller would be oblivious of?

>>40
Of course you need to malloc at least once (or you might need to malloc more than once to find out how much you need to malloc if the stack is not enough for that task) to get big memory on the heap, I mean if that's what you need.

But I guess this only will teach you how shitty the von neumann architecture is and then how shitty (presumably)linux handles your memory on the heap. That's not really programming in the purest sense in my opinion, although it is valuable to realize the sorry state of "cutting-edge" computing.

Basically, learn C if you need to know how shitty computing is today, all the nasty mistakes are there for you to see.