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I’ve programmed in both assembly and C, among other things. I stand by it, C is much closer to the machine than most languages.

I think Lisp won that battle. The core syntax was named after actual cpu registers (cdr/car).

Seriously? :)

Is lambda calculus or the PDP instructions set a closer match to which language?

Maybe it is on a PDP-11 . . .

C may not be the same as assembly language but the value of learning it is that in general it is the lowest level that we get to for most software. So, most programming languages are either compiled to C or have a virtual machine that is written in C. Many of the things our programs rely on are written in C, for example operating systems and databases. So in a way we can say that "the metal" is C and by understanding it we can potentially understand how our software works from top to bottom.