Well, then you must be d*mn good. But language options were obviously much more limited back then, and I’ll bet that applications were considerably simpler too. I still say that anyone who voluntarily chooses C for a large application today, let alone a safety-critical one, must be unaware of superior options. I work on a research prototype for an ATC system, and I am using Scala. Take a look at Scala. You might like it.
I shall indeed.
I'm a stale old fart. I like 'c' a great deal; and, I've always wondered why people didn't accumulate applications specific libraries so that they could rely on a perfected code base. We see a lot of "standard" libraries, but few application specific ones. I do build applications libraries; and, those help a great deal with reliability issues within a vertical project base.
From this old fart's point of view, it seems software has become a lot more complicated than it really needs to be. The "bells and whistles" are where most of the failures appear to be exhibited, and certainly where the security vulnerabilities are rooted. Today's machines are blindingly fast compared to what existed a few years ago; however, you really wouldn't know that because of the bloat.
I tend to design for simplicity and use proven hardware/software building blocks.
Once you've programmed for so many years you actually do tend to create few errors ... but they are spectacular when you do. (Who wrote this code! I did? Shoot!)
I've written burglar & fire alarm communicators, cardiac flow monitors, fluids systems controls, water treatment controls, and many other 'critical' apps in C. I program in C, C++, ASM, PASCAL, various flavors of BASIC, JAVA, Perl, Python, PHP, and would trust my life with C over and above any other language out there. Well written C code is the most stable game in town, hands down.