Comment by jerf

It is definitely on its way down, and it is a good thing.

You may think you can handle C. I disagree. The evidence is on my side. We need safer languages.

Heck, that even overstates it. It's not like we need super-safe languages per se. Maybe the 2070s will disagree with me. But we need languages that aren't grotesquely unsafe. It's not just that C isn't as safe as a language could be; it is that it is recklessly unsafe.

Interrupting that descent is foolishness, and pinning your career to a resurrection in C even more foolish. These technologies always have this meta-meta-contrarian phase to them just before they expire. I got into the computer field just as the meta-meta-contrarian "everything must be written in assembler" phase was at its peak. It was a false resurrection and I pity anyone who overinvested in learning how to write large applications in 100% assembler as a result of reading someone's over-enthusiastic screed about the virtues of writing pure assembler in 1998.

So I write this in the hopes of helping some other young HN reader not be fooled. C may be a thing you learn at some point, some day, just as assembler is still something you may learn. But don't get overexcited about the last meta-meta-contrarian false resurrection before death. Which is still years away, but at this point I think it's pretty much set on an irrevocable course.