You forgot old people. I'm positively ancient :) I've used it for 30+ years. It's not the only thing I've used. But I've used it a lot, for deployed systems th

You forgot old people. I'm positively ancient :) I've used it for 30+ years. It's not the only thing I've used. But I've used it a lot, for deployed systems that Just Work(ed)(tm). They don't have a lot of UI, usually. You don't get "cross-platform assembly" in a complete 100% sense and get the enjoy the fruits of hardware diversity. An escape to inline assembly is PERFECTLY FINE. The Linux kernel doesn't use that much assembly. But yeah - "just write inline assembly" is exactly how it's done. And as someone who's done a few Board Support Packages for Linux and other O/S-es, it's not a huge risk - there's generally a port for a processor, so a small number of people write the inline assembly and it gets distributed widely. I don't think people who don't like 'C' should use 'C'. I don't like Java too much, so I pretty much refuse to work in it. I don't touch Web stuff at all, beyond a few weeks here and there. You have to use a pretty weird process to write robust and reliable systems in 'C' but it's not exactly difficult. It just takes... six months of knuckle busting most people don't have. Maybe three months. You have to smooth over learning some arcane rules. I think that the emphasis we see online on 'C' comes from open source, in particular the Linux kernel, and it causes this weird ...status rift to open and people fall into it. I'd been programming professionally for twelve or so years prior to even seeing Linux. In 'C', Pascal for a couple years before 'C'. I FIRMLY believe that 'C' is the mechanism to get the most reliable and deterministic solution to problems. Note I didn't say "fastest". But that's when I do it; after the last few years, there's enough whining about how bad 'C' is that I kinds shrug and say "hey, if it hurts you're doing it wrong. Make yourself happy." but I'm on teams with people who use all the fancy high level stuff and ... frankly, it's not my stuff that doesn't work. Because I've done this for 30+ years.