[lsiebert]

C is currently the language I know best. I may therefore be biased. There are multiple reasons why C is useful for system programming. Legacy code as others have said. A huge community for support and maturity in tools. The fact that C is very close to the bare metal of the system, which means that problems with your code like memory leaks are most likely the programmer's fault , and can thus be fixed by the programmer. It also isn't proprietary in any way. There is no for profit company that controls the language.

C has disadvantages. But many of them are the result of its advantages. Automated garbage collection is great, but garbage collection by hand tuning code gets stuff that AGC may miss.

That said, I'm interested in picking up some of the other languages mentioned.