One great advantage of C (which was kind of mentioned in the article) is predictability of the generated code. Compared to a C++ compilers, a C compiler is much simpler. When you write a for loop, even doing something on a struct or some fairly "complicated" object, you have a fairly good idea of the machine code generated. It's also easier to go between the assembly code and the C code generally. In some applications like email or image processing, this can be valuable.