Agree a bazillion times.

Go or Java on top. Coding in C is like juggling chainsaws to say you can juggle them. C is certainly better than old school Fortran where memory management wasn't developed until later, but platforms like Erlang, Go and JRuby are really hard to beat.

The only problem is convincing people to migrate to different tools and transition codebases to another language. It would take a large project like FreeBSD, LLVM or the Linux kernel to move the needle.