C is not so much powerful as primitive. Because it is primitive, it has very little built-in facilities for such things as automatic memory allocation. In addition, the way pointers are implemented guarantees lots of programming errors, may very difficult to diagnose. C is also "cute", having idiotic expressions like x += 1; and so forth. What it lacks in readability, it makes up for in lack of power. Power in a programming language means doing much with little. With C, one does very little with very much code. I know that C has become widely accepted, but I beg to disagree with the majority who think that C is still appropriate for software development. I have used C for years, and I hate it.