C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
This evolution may compromise Java's claim of being simpler than C++, but my guess is that the effort will make Java a better language than it is today.
After all, C++ isn't a perfect match for Java's design aims either.
No one wants one language. There are applications when it's appropriate to write something in C rather than in Java. If you want to write something where performance is much more important than extensibility, then you might want to choose C rather than Java.
C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new.
We've been using C and C++ way too much - they're nice, but they're very close to the machine and what we wanted was to empower regular users to build applications for Linux.
For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.
Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.
Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.
However, when Java is promoted as the sole programming language, its flaws and limitations become serious.
The kind of programming that C provides will probably remain similar absolutely or slowly decline in usage, but relatively, JavaScript or its variants, or XML, will continue to become more central.