Many new programming languages have developed in last two decades. Java, Python, Ruby, Lisp, etc have gained popularity for different reasons and purposes. Each language has its own band of followers like football teams fans who  try to bring other fans in their fold.

But any good programmer, especially of embedded systems, will tell you that even if you have mastered any of the ‘modern languages’ you must have good knowledge of C. Why?

Only C is close to assembly language. It is appropriate for 8 bit processors to 64 bit processors; in systems with bytes, kilobytes and megabytes of memory.

More over, it is fairly simple to learn(well, not as simple as python) and C-compilers are available for almost every processor in use, and there is a large body of C programmers.

But the real advantage of C over other high level programming languages is that C is ‘low level’ high level language. C gives you  high level of direct hardware control without being difficult to code inlike assembly languages.

In real time systems, where speed of execution is of high importance, C is necessary. You can use other language as front-end in these systems but C for the number crunching , performance critical components.

Here is the discussion on reddit about which language is an alternative to C in embedded systems.