@wendy-lebaron Which BASIC flavor did you start out with? And what sorts of things did you do in C back in the previous century? (It still seems surreal to put it that way. Back in the nineteen hundreds... )
In junior high school, the Apple ][e. LOL. Then I got a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer 2
without Extended BASIC which had only 16KB. Did many things with that but it was slow. Never had a Commodore C64 nor Timex Sinclair.
A bit later for computer science course in high school I got a taste of Borland Turbo Pascal v3. Awesomesauce software although with mind-ruining keystroke shortcuts LOL. Sometime later, when I got a PC, I purchased M$ QuickBASIC v4.5 and Borland Turbo Pascal v6, which had much better full-screen editors. Out of my heavy use of QuickBASIC I came to adopt QB64 at least 10 years later and that's what I have been using since. I have also done a lot with Lua such as a simple WAV file processor. I have programmed many times for my music and various file creation for the music programs I have used. For example, random preset generators for synthesizers.
This kind of stuff I was trying to do with C. I started with PowerC by Mix Software from Richardson, Texas (this company still exists BTW). I also had Borland Turbo C++ but seldom used it. Also had M$ QuickC v2.5 but it was too weird especially the console functions. Both the previous ones named were unlike QuickBASIC, they were too big for the memory that MS-DOS was willing to allocate for them. For example, there was not enough RAM to hold the QuickC editor, compiler/linker and user's program all at the same time, within 640KB. This might be hard to believe today but this was true. An user edited the program in the editor. Then when he/she goes to compile it, the editor overlay had to be swapped out so the program was compiled. Then when compilation was finished, the editor had to be restored in case the user desired to keep changing the program. Alternatively the user could choose to run the program he/she had just created, but for that, the editor had to be swapped out of memory again. M$ tried to resolve it with incremental compilation but it wasn't much faster on my computer. As I've said, it was weird.
Turbo C++ was a bit better cooperating. The problem is I had to sacrifice a 384KB ramdisk to hold the editor's data while swapping to MS-DOS shell or running a program that was created. Discovered that had a different vibe to Turbo Vision, the text-mode GUI-creation library, that that for Turbo Pascal which made me hate object-oriented programming in C++.
Going with C was frustrating because it was quite different from programming in BASIC. In particular, pointers, and I was too comfortable using string functions instead of "strcpy()" and stuff like that. I built a simple text-mode window manager for MS-DOS but remained dissatisfied, it still had a lot of bugs. I have never cared that QB64 for Windows came with a subset of MinGW that I could have used the C++ compiler out of it and ignored BASIC.
A few times however I have done some simple console programs in C. Such as a game in which the user is told to write down the moves into a maze before he/she is shown the maze. This is because I haven't figured out, especially on Linux how to poll interactively for keystrokes. How to do an "ncurses" application which is probably simple to do on Python these days. :/