Azure Sphere, Microsoft's paragon of IoT security, only allows for C.
Those expensive MSc/PhD should just complain to their universities for not providing a proper systems programming classes.
For many places, there are clearly no alternative to C.
The humongous open codebase of high quality C code, exceeding every other language, is also not going anywhere.
The situation is, shortly speaking, "no alternative to doing it in C, but we cannot do it in C because of some purely non-technical constraint." And the situation is very common I feel.
Chipmakers with billions of cash free to throw on RnD can't make any passable Linux kernel work. Google Chrome team must be employing best C++ hackers on the market, and yet.... and the story goes on like this.
The relative overabundance of webdev/java people hides the the fact that we are not only not gaining developers in conventional programming, but losing them fast to age, career change, or them returning back to home countries in case of labour migrants.
Likewise those Webdevs might just brush up their skills for WebAssembly.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter if one is using D, Rust, Swift, Java, C#, Rust, C++, Zig, FreePascal, CUDA, Open... instead of C.
The system programming concepts are the same, and it all boils down to education.
As for lousy candidates, I get them in any language.
When it come to CS fundamentals, algorithmics, most were better than me, who never studied CS academically. This was the reason we ever took interest in them.
It's just you cannot compensate for training, and experience with overall feel of skill. You can hire an ACM olympian, and the guy will still loose it unless he did C professionally for 3-4 years.
Someone lousy in low level coding won't go through such a curriculum,
https://www.di.fct.unl.pt/en/education/integrated-master-com...
Again, a matter of teaching quality.
Basic C can be picked up in very short time. there is nothing to be frightened about. When I first laid my hands on C I wrote working software (keyboard driver for DOS) in a first day as a learning exercise. Not sure what other than incompetence as a programmers is causing your expensive PhDs "fright of their lifetime".
Memory management, handwritten loops, pointers everywhere, absence of ready made data structures, error handling (or its absence,) epopeia with C strings, sanitizing inputs, and nausea from the slightest smell of SIMD, or basic binary hackery to begin with.
C was amazing when it was introduced, but is as archaic as COBOL today. We are stuck with it because of legacy.
Amazing was what Burroughs was doing in 1961, 10 years before C came to be, IBM RISC research in PL/S and PL.8, VAX/VMS stuff in BLISS, Solo OS in Concurrent Pascal, Xerox XDE in Mesa, ....
Those were amazing in the 60's and mid-70's.
It was not amazing. It was decent particular tool for particular job. That was all about it. Same thing about Rust. There are no silver bullets laying around.
It might be C++ instead of C for some of the above, but that doesn't make C "a legacy tool".
I’m saying it’s a legacy tool from the early 70’s that is absolutely terrible compared to what we could have.
Cool kids use it because there is no alternative.
Can share horror stories of expensive hires with MSc/PhD degrees, and years of experience having a fright of their lifetime when they see real world C.