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Amen, brother! But i would add C++ too (with reservations on the "easy" part); to me they go together. In one of my previous posts i had mentioned the advantages of C, two of which are worth listing here.

a) C allows you to program "everything"; from big honking servers (backend and frontend), networking protocols and systems etc. and all the way down to itty-bitty 8-bit MCUs. Basically from above assembly to any sort of application you might care about.

b) C is the de-facto "glue" language to everything i.e. the "assembly" of high-level languages. Almost all languages allow you to link to a C module.

I am often mystified when people say C is "hard" when they program in languages like Java/Python/Javascript etc. To me these languages are baroque and hard since they require more mental effort to memorize and use the bazillion frameworks, libraries, objects and methods. I find them all quite overwhelming.

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> I am often mystified when people say C is "hard"

Here are some examples of why people say C is hard:

https://pzemtsov.github.io/2016/11/06/bug-story-alignment-on...

https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1520

https://www.imperialviolet.org/2016/06/26/nonnull.html

> Almost all languages allow you to link to a C module.

no, almost all languages allow you to call into your operating system's native dynamic library format.

That this binary was originally built with C, C++ in extern "C", fortran, ADA, D -betterC, Pascal... does not matter at all.

C just happens to be the most popular language for building those...

>That this binary was originally built with C, C++ in extern "C", fortran, ADA, D -betterC, Pascal... does not matter at all.

Not quite; the point of using the phrase "link to a C module" was to point out that all of them conform to the applicable "C ABI" for a platform and therein lies C's strength as a "glue" language.

C does not have an ABI in itself, it just uses the conventions of its host system.

e.g. how function calls are done, how names are mangled (for instance on macOS all function names are prepended with an underscore and not on 64-bit windows nor linux...), etc... none of this is defined in the C standard, and it varies across platforms.

>the applicable "C ABI" for a platform

Was the phrase i used. It is well known that the C standard does not define an ABI but a processor arch+OS i.e. platform defines it. Over time that defined for C binaries on a platform have become the "de facto" standard and almost all other language run-times hew to it as needed.