I'm confused. Did C stop being taken seriously at some point? C is the only language that you can truly get things done without having to fight the language every step of the way.<p>I can't say the same of... well, any other language I've used in the past 5 years.
>C was developed between 1969 and 1973, making it nearly 40 years old [...] C ha[s] already made an exceptionally good start on a century-long reign<p>In all fairness, development continued past 1973. Most C programmers today would have some trouble even reading the code from the 1978 first edition of K&R; and the void* pointer, that the author refers to later in the article, was a part of ANSI C (~1990).
Pure C seems to be enjoying a bit of language fad hipness lately but I don't know anybody that has to maintain a large body of non-trivial, low-level code that chooses pure C over C++. There's a good reason that everything from Solaris to V8 to Photoshop to Quake is written in C++ and not C.<p>That C is still in wide use after 40 years is a testament to the elegance of its original design but let's not get carried away.
Saying that "TIOBE rankings are at least the best system we currently have" for gauging uptake of a programming language is like saying that astrology is the best system we have for predicting the future.
Those TIOBE numbers (linked to in the article) are quite interesting.<p>As well as C refusing to go away, there's a noticeable surge for C#, Objective-C and Lua, and a substantial erosion in the popularity of trendy languages like Python and Ruby.
Whoa, that page is hard on the eyes....I didn't get far in that article, but I think C has continued to live on as well as a foundation that has spawned other great languages. I don't see it (or variations of it) going away anytime soon.
The problem is, nothing in this article even begins to address the actual criticism people have of C, instead saying that it's possible to write good C code and that Java is a memory hog. The first is true, the second is debatable, both as to whether it's the case and whether it matters.<p>For example, read this: <a href="http://www.jwz.org/doc/gc.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.jwz.org/doc/gc.html</a><p>> In a large application, a good garbage collector is more efficient than malloc/free.<p>My point isn't necessarily to disagree with the article, but to point out that the article has practically nothing to disagree with. It has no substance.