It's not just C. A lot of procedural code is written in perl, for example. It's true that languages that force you to write procedural code are relatively rare,

It's not just C. A lot of procedural code is written in perl, for example. It's true that languages that force you to write procedural code are relatively rare, but languages that force you to write OO are by no means the rule. IME, OO sometimes works, sometimes not. It's not necessarily about getting close to the hardware, either.