What makes C so popular in the age of OOP?

Posted by GradGuy on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by GradGuy
Published on 2012-03-24T11:39:46Z Indexed on 2012/03/24 17:37 UTC
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object-oriented

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c

I code a lot both in C and C++ but did not expect C to be the second popular language, slightly behind Java! http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

I'm curious as why, in this age of OOP, C is still all that popular? Note that 4 out of top 5 popular languages are all "modern" object-oriented capable languages. Now I agree that you can do OOP in C to some extend, but that's sort of painful and not quite elegant! (well at least compared to C++ I guess) So what makes C this popular? efficiency? being low-level? or the vast majority of libraries that already exist? ... or something else?

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