You seem to be talking about a very specific area. As I've eluded to earlier, there are clearly jobs where C is best suited, but C is hardly the best choice in

You seem to be talking about a very specific area. As I've eluded to earlier, there are clearly jobs where C is best suited, but C is hardly the best choice in most of the areas it is used. People are still doing GUI programming in C. That is a really poor fit for the language. C isn't automatically easier to achieve high performance. Depends on what sort of problems we are talking about. If I remember correctly CouchDB was written in C/C++ originally and they switched to Erlang and got both much less code and higher performance. But in something like a game engine were you want to be able to control memory layout and allocation C/C++ is a benefit. But Rust/Swift/Go allows you to do much of the same to various degrees. At my work people write codecs and stuff and C is clearly a benefit due to its closeness to the metal. And as you say, yes they do write odd code at times because they know a lot about how the C compiler translates various constructs to assembly code. But this is specialist work. Most C coding doesn't involve this type of coding. I think I just have to agree to disagree with you about correctness though. I had several years of C experience when I first tried Standard ML, and I manage to get a sorting algorithm correct on first try in SML, something I've never done in C. There will always be some stupid off by one type of error. People have conducted studies of these sort of things and tend to measure better results for functional languages. One notable property of C programs is also that for any group of C programmers there is a huge variation in performance of the programs they write. The top C developers beat anybody. But average C programs are often slower than even average Python programs.