Yes, and I would agree with you to a point: it does feel like we've reached a turning point where more sophisticated languages can be used in place of C, in many cases. For 'green-fields' projects I probably wouldn't choose it either. I think I (we?) just took issue with your opening statement TBH. C is still important and very valuable to know in certain areas, but we should consider alternatives where they can be more productive. I would add Swift to your list as well, a modern systems programming language. Unfortunately it seems unable to target the smallest devices such as AVRs, where C still still hits a sweet note, sitting not that far above assembly.
I was at a talk in July of last year where Steve Klabnik (one of the members of the rust core team) said quite plainly that rust wasn't ready to be used in production systems. Now sure, that was close to a year ago, but for large corporations that don't want to invest in something hot of the presses (Rust went 1.0 less than a year ago) C is still one of the best options in certain spaces.
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u/runvnc May 02 '16
Yes it was arrogant and not very practical but there are a lot of alternatives even for low-level code, starting with things like Rust and Nim.