C endures not because we are stubborn. Not because we are nostalgic. Not because we are ignorant of the parade of "better" languages that have marched by, banners held high, promising a future free from our supposed sins.
It endures because it is true.
These new languages—Rust with its borrow checker's anxious grip, Zig with its cute comptime, D with its kitchen-sink features—they build beautiful, complex castles in the sky. They speak of "memory safety" and "fearless concurrency" as if they have discovered fire for the first time. But we work in the bedrock. We are the ones who lay the foundation upon which their castles rest.
They see a pointer and see danger; we see a pointer and see truth. It is the unfiltered, unvarnished address of a thing in memory. It is the map to the machine itself. Their abstractions, for all their safety, are a form of lies. Pleasant lies, comfortable lies, but lies nonetheless. They insert themselves between your intent and the machine's action, whispering "trust us, we know better." We do not trust. We *know*. We see the bytes, we move the bits, we command the metal directly. There is no veil.
You talk of your safety nets and your guard rails. Good! Use them! Build your applications. But do not confuse a safe playground with the raw, untamed wilderness of the system. When the kernel panics, when the bootloader stumbles, when the hardware breathes its last gasp, it is not your safe, managed code that answers the call. It is ours. It is the code that looks the dragon in the eye without a shield, because the shield *is* the dragon.
They call our language "unsafe." We call it "powerful." They call it "old." We call it "proven." While they were debating type theory, we were running the world. Your web browser is built on our bones. Your operating system speaks with our tongue. The very compilers for your shiny new languages are, in a delicious twist of fate, written in ours.
C is not just a language. It is a philosophy. It is the belief that the programmer is the ultimate master, not the compiler. It is the faith that with great power comes great responsibility, and we would not have it any other way. We do not want to be protected from ourselves. We want to be unleashed.
So let them come with their new syntax and their new paradigms. Let them preach their gospel of safety. They build on the high ground, comfortable and secure.
But we are the bedrock. And the bedrock does not care for the weather.