Re:Easy. (Score 1)

Definitely agree that power/performance are still important, and these factors were lacking in the analysis in TFA. I used to think modern computers were all fast enough that learning C could be left to the minority, until I realized some of my complicated database queries that were taking hours could be done in seconds by adding C routines (thank god for open source). C is fast because it's optimized for hardware, and hardware is optimized for C. There used to be groups optimizing hardware for Java and Lisp, but those never took off because other hardware became faster and made the efforts obsolete. But "other hardware" is still optimized for C, so it will be a long time until C goes into obsolescence.