C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.

I'm just an observer of Java, and where Microsoft wants to go with C# is too early to tell.

I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

The visible things that have come from the group have been the Plan 9 system and Inferno, but I hasten to say that the ideas and the work have come from colleagues.

The kind of programming that C provides will probably remain similar absolutely or slowly decline in usage, but relatively, JavaScript or its variants, or XML, will continue to become more central.