I'm on the younger end of the age-scale (23), and i would have to agree that less people are learning C as a matter of course these days. Over the whole programmer population the percentage would be very low, but the hacker population is almost defined by its use of C. Many notable and large hacker projects are based on C; Mozilla, Linux Kernel, GNU tools, etc. I think this is in part because the community has such a strong legacy and is driven to keep building and extending what has come before, but also because of the higher average programming ability in the hacker community compared to the general programming population.

From my perspective using Linux is one reason i know some C, but the greater reason is because my formal education included embedded C programming with microcontrollers. Programmers going through pure software engineering courses seem to focus much more on computer science and web development concepts, rather than systems design and programming. That said, i'm sure my experience is not typical, and other universities probably use C in some part of their courses.

In terms of actual programming, i haven't yet found a project which required the use of C, and in the cases where i have used it i've often stumbled more with the bulky IDE and build configurations than the language itself. My particular trouble is around external references and including code not in the standard library, and then the further dependency hell.

Searching around i haven't really found any C tutorial that really covers this sort of stuff really well, most tutorials focus on the language itself (which i don't really have an issue with). Does anyone know any good resources on how to set up an optimal and easy to manage C development environment?