When you're an expert in C, you tend to forget how much you've really learned. And not just about the language itself, or the available libraries, but about your own coding style. As an experienced programmer, you have habits and intuition that make developing and debugging your code vastly easier than for a novice. The reason that C has given so much ground to a language like Java is not that Java is intrinsically more powerful, but that novice and intermediate programmers can be much more productive with it from the start. Companies don't want to hire a 10-year C veteran at $125/hr to code up their CRUD app, even if one were readily available. They want to be able to hire interchangeable $50/hr Java guys with a bit of experience, who won't have to waste days at a time trying to track down intermittent memory problems or re-writing the wheel because they aren't aware someone wrote a C lib for something Java has built-in.