Pick the right tool for each job.

C is fantastic for small and very optimized components. If you want it portable, from microcontrolers to GPUs, it is the best choice too.

But if you need rapid prototyping, large scale projects within an organization or some libraries and tools to make the perfect, animated, templated and themed user interface you should think twice before choosing C. Java and .Net are freaking good at database integration and memory allocation/dealocation. Erlang is fantastic for multitasking and multithreading. Ruby on Rails or Python on Django are much better to prototype a website nannying a database.

You already know the saying "if your only tool is an hammer..."