>>23
implying C is low-level enough to precisely control a computer
In assembly, all details must be tracked by hand. Since knowledgeable humans are smarter than compilers, albeit much slower, they are capable of doing a substantially better job of creating smaller more efficient code. This is true, despite the claims of the modern OS community, compilers are still only about half as good as a talented assembly programmer. They just save a lot of time.
However, C is crippled by an inconsistent syntax, a weak text based macro system, and an insurmountable barrier between run time and compile time name spaces. C can only be customized via the #define operator and by functions. Unfortunately, this makes it impossible to do many interesting and easy things, many of C’s fundamental areas, structures, setting, getting, expressions, flow of control, and scope are completely off limits for customization. Since functions always have a new scope, they are not useful creating flow of control constructs, and #define is so weak that it can’t even handle the vagaries of the structure syntax. For those who know C very well it is often a convenient language, since it is good at expressions and basic flow of control. However, whenever complicated data structures are involved the effort needed is obscene, and C in unable to transfer this effort from one data type to another similar one.
The advent of the new class metaphor has brought to the fore C and C++’s weakness at memory management. Programmers are forced to create and destroy these new objects in a variety of bizarre fashions. The heap is managed by the wretched malloc model, which uses wasteful memory cookies, creates mysterious crashes on overwrites, and endless fragmentation.