[creatornator]

I disagree about replacement programmers--at the moment, practically every graduating electrical engineer and computer engineer will have a working knowledge of C. Embedded C has lost some ground to C++, but primarily in ARM and x86 architectures, since for more memory constrained AVR/PIC/etc. microcontrollers, you absolutely avoid template inheritance because vtables are untenable, there often isn't an available STL for the chip toolchain anyways, templates balloon the program space, and you are still constrained to using just stack allocation. That right there pretty much means there will always be a space where C is more pragmatic.

I see this pattern a lot on HN. Many aren't aware that there are fields alive and well that require the use of unsafe, deterministic C that can compile to programs on the order of kb.