My thoughts on why C is effective: Simple. An average C programmer can easily learn 90% of the language and use 80% on a daily basis. So C programmers can unde

My thoughts on why C is effective: Simple. An average C programmer can easily learn 90% of the language and use 80% on a daily basis. So C programmers can understand each other generally well. Although different projects usually have different styles, they are very minor differences. Assembler friendly. You can link C code and assembler together with negligible overhead. Almost every performance demanding project has its busiest part written in assembler. Even though sometimes C is lack of a certain construct that you require, you can always implement it in assembler and connect it with C code (longjmp as a good example). Using assembler may seem to be contradictory to the first point, but remember only a handful of people need to work at such a low level, other people just use the C interfaces. Reusable. C has a huge set of robust and portable libraries. Their authors are proven to be surprisingly disciplined. However, we have to admit writing good C code is very hard. And I can see that less and less people will use it going forward. Steve Jobs' "trucks and cars" metaphor applies here too.