As someone who likes C, I'd like to add a bit of a different look:
The aspect that I love about C is how easy it becomes to read. C offers a (arguably) nice programming interface while not allowing the programmer to hide very many things that are going on. C allows you to make nice abstractions, but those abstractions are still built upon the same basic concepts that C supports, and these abstractions generally don't fundamentally change how the language works, so you can very easily tell the control flow of your program if you simply understand the interactions between the basic parts in use.
Now that said, I'll be the first to say that I think C could benefit from a variety of different features (Some from C++, some from others, and some unique to C), and I could easily give you a fairly long "wish-list" I have for C. But, the clear nature of C is a huge advantage that I think is underrated, and is something that you really can't get back in a language once you lose it.
When you (or I) read a piece of C++ code, there are a lot more details you have to take into account then when you read a piece of C code, simply because C would force the writer to be more explicit in what they are doing in those cases.
Again though, I'll make it clear that I don't think C is the be-all end-all of languages - in particular I'm excited to see how Rust goes - but I do think it has traits that are very nice but largely ignored in most of the current languages in favor of adding lots of different ways to write your code.
The aspect that I love about C is how easy it becomes to read. C offers a (arguably) nice programming interface while not allowing the programmer to hide very many things that are going on. C allows you to make nice abstractions, but those abstractions are still built upon the same basic concepts that C supports, and these abstractions generally don't fundamentally change how the language works, so you can very easily tell the control flow of your program if you simply understand the interactions between the basic parts in use.
Now that said, I'll be the first to say that I think C could benefit from a variety of different features (Some from C++, some from others, and some unique to C), and I could easily give you a fairly long "wish-list" I have for C. But, the clear nature of C is a huge advantage that I think is underrated, and is something that you really can't get back in a language once you lose it.
When you (or I) read a piece of C++ code, there are a lot more details you have to take into account then when you read a piece of C code, simply because C would force the writer to be more explicit in what they are doing in those cases.
Again though, I'll make it clear that I don't think C is the be-all end-all of languages - in particular I'm excited to see how Rust goes - but I do think it has traits that are very nice but largely ignored in most of the current languages in favor of adding lots of different ways to write your code.