"it has it's particular domains which in my opinion are low-level programming and performant, portable code with a small footprint."
I realize you're defending C, here, but I'd just like to use you for a moment to ask why this sort of thing gets stated over and over and over on HN.
C is good for low-level, systems software, embedded systems, and speed.
You know what else it's good for? Hundred and hundreds of desktop applications, userspace tools, web backends, and everything else.
It's like we keep saying it's for low level stuff, but thousands upon thousands of developers haven't got the memo. Who would dream of writing a media framework in C? The folks who do GStreamer, ffmpeg, MLT. User interfaces? Nah, it's for low-level stuff. Except, you know, GTK and Clutter. It's not for Web programming either, except maybe Apache and Nginx. You wouldn't check your email with it (mutt), or edit code with it (Vim), or make music with it (CSound, SuperCollider), or draw pictures with it (Gimp).
Maybe you're right, and that C is a bad language for all this type of stuff, but good grief -- there are a lot of developers shipping working, high-level systems in this language. And it's not like they haven't heard of Haskell or Java or Python -- or C++. In fact, we might ask when Java or Python is seriously going to challenge C in these areas.
Agreed, but I was mainly focusing on the aforementioned domains in which C is the 'de facto' standard due to it's properties.
However I believe there are lots of applications written in C because that was either the 'language d'jour' back when they were written or that the author was very proficient in it, which could be rewritten in something like Go,Java,C# or even Python and similar without any perceptable loss of performance.
Looking at things where C dominates to this day and show no sign of weakening, I see operating-system level code (kernel, driver, userland<->kernel interface code), libraries for cpu intensive workloads (audio/video codecs, compression/decompression, low level game framework components etc) and of course cpu intensive applications (encoders, archivers, graphics manipulation software for 2d/3d etc), I guess I should squeeze in version control software here aswell :)
However, there exists a wide range of applications outside of these areas where I think C isn't particularly competitive these days as it's strengths are dwarfed by it's weaknesses.
That's not to say that there is anything wrong with writing such applications in C, particularly considering aspects such as proficiency and familiarity, if you know C very well and feel very comfortable programming in it then it's less likely you'd want to switch to something else for 'convenience'.
I realize you're defending C, here, but I'd just like to use you for a moment to ask why this sort of thing gets stated over and over and over on HN.
C is good for low-level, systems software, embedded systems, and speed.
You know what else it's good for? Hundred and hundreds of desktop applications, userspace tools, web backends, and everything else.
It's like we keep saying it's for low level stuff, but thousands upon thousands of developers haven't got the memo. Who would dream of writing a media framework in C? The folks who do GStreamer, ffmpeg, MLT. User interfaces? Nah, it's for low-level stuff. Except, you know, GTK and Clutter. It's not for Web programming either, except maybe Apache and Nginx. You wouldn't check your email with it (mutt), or edit code with it (Vim), or make music with it (CSound, SuperCollider), or draw pictures with it (Gimp).
Maybe you're right, and that C is a bad language for all this type of stuff, but good grief -- there are a lot of developers shipping working, high-level systems in this language. And it's not like they haven't heard of Haskell or Java or Python -- or C++. In fact, we might ask when Java or Python is seriously going to challenge C in these areas.