When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a worldwide crowd.

Some consider UNIX to be the second most important invention to come out of AT&T Bell Labs after the transistor.

Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9

C is declining somewhat in usage compared to C++, and maybe Java, but perhaps even more compared to higher-level scripting languages. It's still fairly strong for the basic system-type things.

Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson. Unix was basically his, likewise C's predecessor, likewise much of the basis of Plan 9 (though Rob Pike was the real force in getting it together). And in the meantime Ken created the first computer chess master and pretty much rewrote the book on chess endgames. He is quite a phenomenon.

At least for the people who send me mail about a new language that they're designing, the general advice is: do it to learn about how to write a compiler

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.