Comment by leoedin

My comment wasn't saying that modern development practices only exist in newer languages - I agree that all those things are possible with C.

But the language does bring benefits. In my experience modern strongly typed languages with large standard libraries and nice tooling are more productive than C (and probably more than C++, although writing idiomatic modern C++ is quite nice). C's simplicity is nice, but it still exists in a world where your only option for 3rd party libraries are zips downloaded from some random Sourceforge. Trying to write a C program with effective string handling is an absolute nightmare. All those things are solved many times over in other languages.

As a tool for writing very low level routines handling fixed length data, C is pretty good. But embedded development is moving away from that - every project seems to have some sort of web API, and that's when the downsides of C really start to show themselves.