[jwhite]

Late to that party, but I'll give my $0.02 regardless.

I won't defend C: it's all that you say. I think one of the acknowledged reasons for C's longevity is that it is impedance-matched for UNIX because they grew up together, and for various reasons UNIX is popular with hackers; therefore C is popular. C is deeply rooted within UNIX, partly because the ABI has been so stable for so long. If you want to write a library for UNIX, you generally target C because anything else will run into a quagmire of cross-compiler incompatibility issues. That means all the good libraries on UNIX are written in C or present a C ABI/API. The easiest language to use a C library from is... C. Or C++. So application writers (and tool writers) have often favoured C as well, although the rise of interpreted languages such as Python, Perl, and Ruby has changed that a bit. Also, the C/C++ toolchains have tended to be more advanced than those of other languages.

So, C is still with us, but for reasons that don't have as much to do with its merits as a language as with its merits as a platform (when coupled with UNIX).