[umanwizard]

> c is easily my favorite programming language

That's not really relevant to the discussion of whether it's the proper language to be used for something like OpenSSL.

> it just works really damn well

As far as I can tell, all mainstream programming languages "work well", so it's not clear what you mean.

> produces very small binaries

True but not very important IMO

> it's easy to write terrible code in any programming language

Sure. But it's not easy to write this particular flavor of terrible code -- buffer overflows -- in any commonly-used language other than C and its derivatives.