I think most programming languages that are decades old aren't looked at as 'not fit for modern problems' so much as 'inefficient for modern* development'. Is

I think most programming languages that are decades old aren't looked at as 'not fit for modern problems' so much as 'inefficient for modern* development'. Is it possible to do the same things in C that we can in Ruby, PHP or Node? Absolutely. But can it be written in the same time frame? While I'm sure there are HNers out there who can - or who at least claim they can ;) - let's ask ourselves if that's really broadly truthful outside of trivial example applications. I'd wager 'no'. Those higher level languages might 'forget' something in the past and 'rediscover' it but I feel like that's kind of a very minor sub-plot in the larger story of the usefulness of their abstraction and ability to represent more powerful ideas in less lines of code. * - read 'web'. Old and low level languages are still obviously used in a wide variety of projects and industries.