His "challenge" is too ridiculous to even reply to.  Of course software that has had millions of users (and hundreds of contributers) over 30 years is going to be better than what some language advocate is going to be able to crank out in a week or month or year.  Put enough time and polish into something, and it's going to be good regardless of what language you choose.<p>It would be a waste of time to rewrite some well-established project to prove some point about a language.  ("Hey, I spent a year of my free time to make a $foo that's not as good as the $foo that already exists!  Yeah!!!")  It's much better to incrementally move away from the legacy code, to make future incremental improvements.  (Firefox is a good example; more and more of the code is safe Javascript instead of raw C++.  That's because it's easier to write/test/enhance, and because modern computers and virtual machines make the overhead acceptable.)<p>There is, of course, a surprising amount of non-C code out there.  Firefox is Javascript.  Emacs is Lisp.  SBCL is Lisp.  GHC is Haskell.  Xmonad is Haskell.  Debian's packaging system is Perl.  The websites you use daily are Perl/Python/Ruby/PHP.  And so on.  Of the software packages that I use on a daily basis, very few are pure C.  (xmms2 is.  That's all.)<p>C exists in production software, but that's because it was the only option when these programs were being developed.<p>Take a snapshot of new ideas and projects being started <i>right now</i>, and see if C is still the most popular.  That is a more reliable indicator of the state of the art.