C-Based languages

C is an amazingly designed language.  It's beautiful, simple, elegant and fast.
Everything a well designed programming language should be.

C++ then came along and shit all over Dennis Ritchie's masterpiece.  Bjarne took a beautiful, simple, elegant and fast language. And kept shitting on it until all that was left was 'fast'.  Dennis should of beat the shit out of him for turning his work of art into an abomination.

Then Gosling came along, surveyed the turd that Bjarne had dropped, and attempted to clean it up.    He redesigned C++ to remove the crap and attain the elegance that C had.  Unfortunately, in his cleaning frenzy, he over-simplified the language and sacrificed speed.  In the name of simplicity he removed pointers, manual memory management,  generics, operator overloading and native code compilation.  A noble effort, but ultimately just as much of a failure as C++.

>>19
simple enough to visualize the actual instructions from the source code.
Only if you're using a non-optimizing compiler that doesn't make good use of your CPU.
>>31
C is too low level
Not true. C is not low level enough for low level usage and not high level enough for high level usage. BLISS and PL/M are low level, in the sense of controlling CPU instructions and registers and being able to do whatever your CPU can do. They have the full power of the assembly language. You can write a boot-loader or kernel in those languages without any inline assembly. C has far fewer capabilities than any hardware architecture. Even MIPS I, which is practically a "C machine," has overflow checking. Good C compilers can turn loops into single instructions even on RISCs. It's better if the programmer is able to say what they mean instead of writing a loop and having the compiler guess.
>>38
no other language that gives such static control of data on memeory
Compared to many languages (such as PL/I or COBOL), C has terrible control of data in memory. You can't do anything about integer overflow. Dividing by zero is undefined behavior (not a signal, that's POSIX). You can't even tell C how you want structures to be aligned to simplify I/O (even if it causes a huge performance penalty).