At some point, these conversations seem to always turn into a contest to see who can be the most pedantic. Which I think is pretty fun - and pretty well in the spirit of the original article - but that's me, and I can't fault anyone for being turned off by it.

's funny, I am certainly aware of having, at some point, at least skimmed over the C99 standard encountered the concept of a storage duration. But, aside from that brief few hours, virtually the entirety of my C-knowing career has been spent thinking and talking in terms of stacks and heaps.

Meanwhile, in my .NET career, I really did (and, I guess, still do) feel like it was important to keep track of how .NET's distinction is between reference types and value types, and whether or not they were stack or heap allocated was an implementation detail.

Most languages do that internally. It's not a reason you should learn C in particular while you're trying to get an understanding of heaps and stacks.

Indeed. There's a place for language lawyering, but that place is not everywhere.