Look, I love C as much as the next person but the language is just rife with problems if not used extremely carefully and things like heartbleed, shellshock and most recently the systemd exploit just prove that even experts can get C wrong.

Modern systems development needs safe and formally provable languages, C++ in my opinion is extremely bloated, some believe Go or Rust will end up being the natural successor to C but that doesn’t seem likely in the near future.

I’m also not sure if C should be a person’s first programming language. I think it’s important to learn a language initially that lets you get things done and sustains interest rather than something that bogs you down in technical details and doesn’t give you much information should something go wrong (having to debug segfaults with gdb can be a huge put off for somebody who has just started learning to program).