If you think of C as the closest thing to a “platform independent assembly language” as can exist, it starts to make more sense.
I can certainly see that, but it's the nuts-and-bolts, practical side of understanding the structure, the grammar and the maddening, seemingly cryptic application of indentation that makes me crazy. T-SQL, BASIC, PASCAL and other database programming languages were never that hard to understand. Boy - did date myself with that.