The following quote about C comes from a Quora answer to the above question:
I don’t think C gets enough credit. Sure, C doesn’t love you. C isn’t about love–C is about thrills. C hangs around in the bad part of town. C knows all the gang signs. C has a motorcycle, and wears the leathers everywhere, and never wears a helmet, because that would mess up C’s punked-out hair. C likes to give cops the finger and grin and speed away. Mention that you’d like something, and C will pretend to ignore you; the next day, C will bring you one, no questions asked, and toss it to you with a you-know-you-want-me smirk that makes your heart race. Where did C get it? “It fell off a truck,” C says, putting away the boltcutters. You start to feel like C doesn’t know the meaning of “private” or “protected”: what C wants, C takes. This excites you. C knows how to get you anything but safety. C will give you anything but commitment. In the end, you’ll leave C, not because you want something better, but because you can’t handle the intensity. C says “I’m gonna live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse,” but you know that C can never die, not so long as C is still the fastest thing on the road.
I love it. Still do most of my programming in C using a mix of vi, emacs, gdb, valgrind and all that good old stuff, resorting to Python/Perl scripts sometimes for automation. Know I should be using a proper development UI and loading up my code with bulky libraries like Boost, and using complex install systems like Cmake and Autoconf, hell, why not even Imake (done all these in the past). I should also be using great inventions like multiple inheritance, operator overloading and recursive templates, but I find C’s simple approach to memory handling and functions just a lot safer.
Most of my students use Java though. Automatic garbage collection and the UI seem to be what they like, as well as the loads of good code to work on out there.
Bayesian Models 