Comment by freedomben

The amount of fear I see from people around C is so surprising to me. Not saying you fit into this, but so far my anecdata suggests that it's largely people who don't know (or know very little) C. Especially among CS grads whose main exposure to C was in the stack smashing exercise in a security class, all they know about C is the part that was intentionally made vulnerable so it would be easy to exploit. Unless you're being wildly negligent and reckless with your programming, C is really not that scary.