I'm not really putting C on a pedestal here. :)

I'm only saying: Some skills are so radically different that you cannot transfer easily from one to the other. To give a counter example in the other direction: When i taught a former Lisp developer Perl, it took him 3 months to get to a good level, and 3 more to be on a very high level. And he's an extremely bright guy.

Then again, he had never done web apps before. Maybe the language matters a lot less if you're staying within the same problem domain.