Having practical experience working at a company that has a large number of developers trying their stab at C, I'm bound to agree.
It's clear that you can make great code in C, if you're a good programmer and get enough time to plan things like memory management done right. Enough examples of that.
But when you don't, C is a terrible language. It is very verbose, it makes you repeat yourself and the macro system is so error-prone to the point that it's usually forbidden to use. So you have to resort to custom code generators (we have at least three!).
Most companies don't want to be in the business of worrying about buffer overflows and memory leaks and segmentation faults. They want the requested functionality implemented robustly ASAP. If there is less code to be written, there is less to test and worry about, so a high-level language that takes those concerns (largely) away is a great help.
So my advise would be to limit using C to the performance-critical parts (found using benchmarking), and only make developers work on that which understand every detail about C. Also, give them enough time to test every nook and cranny threefold.
It's clear that you can make great code in C, if you're a good programmer and get enough time to plan things like memory management done right. Enough examples of that.
But when you don't, C is a terrible language. It is very verbose, it makes you repeat yourself and the macro system is so error-prone to the point that it's usually forbidden to use. So you have to resort to custom code generators (we have at least three!).
Most companies don't want to be in the business of worrying about buffer overflows and memory leaks and segmentation faults. They want the requested functionality implemented robustly ASAP. If there is less code to be written, there is less to test and worry about, so a high-level language that takes those concerns (largely) away is a great help.
So my advise would be to limit using C to the performance-critical parts (found using benchmarking), and only make developers work on that which understand every detail about C. Also, give them enough time to test every nook and cranny threefold.