As someone obsessed with writing C code, something just clicked. I think I understand better why there are so many JavaScript programmers, so many tools and frameworks written in and around JS every day.

For me, C is the gateway to the computer. It's ubiquitous. It's deceptively simple. I can literally write anything I want in C. It's an exciting thing to have an open main.c file sitting in front of me.

That must be how JS developers feel about the browser. The browser is a natural way to start learning programming for someone new to it these days. When I was growing up, we didn't really have JS and the web was brand new. I had to learn from QBasic's "Help" menu!

I bet there's an age correlation, too. I bet over a certain age, it's way more C programmers, and under it is way more JS people. (And above us is probably FORTRAN and above them is probably COBOL.)

I agree completely about C being the gateway to the computer. It really is the only way to go if you want to learn real programming. That doesn't mean I'm discounting JavaScript developers, but I like C better and it's more fun.

Slightly off topic: The way I look at it, C and C++ are the bedrock of all programming languages, because the popular compliers (llvm/clang, gcc and VisualStudio) are written in C and C++.

JavaScript, for example requires a browser to compile, which requires gcc or clang to compile. Python, Rust, etc all depend on programs written in C and C++.

Go is one recent exception of a popular language whose main implementation is completely self hosted. Though, Go doesn't host other popular languages.

C (this view is usually presented as only about c) isn't fundamental or bedrock in any way. Most of our current stacks just happen to be written in it.

The original Mac OS for instance was written in Pascal and C. The most popular open source compilers are written in c++. Most browsers are written in c++ not in c.

And there's no reason these days you couldn't rewrite llvm (a set of compiler libraries and compilers mostly written in c++, not that rust compiler uses llvm for code generation but the frontend is in rust) in haskell or java or javascript(they'd be slower but they would work). Haskell has useful features for writing compilers and a lot of language analysis libraries already. If you re-wrote in in rust it'd be just as fast.

Hell this guy (https://github.com/jameysharp/corrode) wrote a rust-c source-to-source compiler in literate haskell. Also in a few years servo will be a full browser in rust and Firefox is already adding components written in rust.

Other then os interface & c binary api linking there is nothing special about c or c++.