In C there are no data structures: there are pointers and pointer arithmetic. So you have a pointer into a data structure.
I've noticed that just about every time I find a large program with known glitches that no one seems able to fix, that program is written in C and is likely written by a programming team in a remote location.
The original version of C did not have structures. So to make tables of objects, process tables and file tables and this tables and that tables, it really was fairly painful.
C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.
For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.
The devil is real. He lives inside C programs.
My father taught me Basic and rudimentary C, I learned everything else on my own, including studying computational complexity on my own. That's more a function of my age than anything else though - back when I was in school there were hardly any programming classes.
C is a razor-sharp tool, with which one can create an elegant and efficient program or a bloody mess.
An initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer.
Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.
The kind of programming that C provides will probably remain similar absolutely or slowly decline in usage, but relatively, JavaScript or its variants, or XML, will continue to become more central.
