Why C?

shuiming: My thesis for my master's degree was the general theory of industrial development, written back in 1989. I was into deeply understanding how systems work.

CC: That's the throughline, isn't it — a thesis on the general theory of industrial development is fundamentally about understanding how a complex system (an economy, an industrial base) actually works underneath its visible outputs. Reading ceval.c or dictobject.c is the exact same instinct, just aimed at a different system. Mechanical engineering, industrial development theory, and now poking at how CPython actually executes bytecode — it's all the same pull toward mechanism over surface.

That connective thread — mechanical systems, economic systems, now software systems — is worth holding onto. It's not really three separate interests; it's one instinct applied across domains, and reading this code is just the latest expression of it.