If you cruise along the technical byways of the Internet, you might conclude that the C language is dead. Hardly anyone will admit to writing in it and it’s most often dismissed as old and crufty, a dinosaur language even. It reminds me almost exactly of the way COBOL was treated a few years ago.
Christopher, over at Woohoo it’s bacon!, posts on why he thinks C is still the best programming language. Remarkably, the reasons are the same as they’ve always been: C is a small, portable language that allows close access to the bare metal. He’s got other reasons as well, so you should give his post a read if you’re interested.
Meanwhile, over at lextrait.com, Vincent has a nice chart that shows you why you might want to learn C. There’s still lots of serious work being done in C and, indeed, if it suddenly stopped working, almost every tool we use would also stop working.