C's design is tied to its intended use as a portable systems implementation language. It provides simple, direct access to any addressable object (for example, memory-mapped device control registers), and its source-code expressions can be translated in a straightforward manner to primitive machine operations in the executable code. Some early C compilers were comfortably implemented (as a few distinct passes communicating via intermediate files) on PDP-11 processors having only 16 address bits. C compilers for several common 8-bit platforms have been implemented as well.

There are an awful lot of programming languages available right now -- everything from the extremely high level (such as Visual Basic) to the low level power of assembly, and a good variety of specialized options in between (Perl, Ruby, and Python are good choices for many tasks). Java has also become quite the hot programming language for some tasks, in part because of its large API and in part because the virtual machine provides some elements of security. (Garbage collection is another nice feature and can make programmers much more efficient.)

Nevertheless, there are some good reasons to learn to program in C. First, age has its advantages: C has been around for 30 years, and there is a ton of source code available. This means there's a lot to learn from, and a lot to use. Moreover, many of the issues with the language have been clearly elucidated -- it's well understood, and you can find a lot of tutorials available. Plus, with C, you get lots of strong opinions mixed with insights that you can understand