I like C. I learned it a long time ago, it was one of my favorite languages to learn, and I'm comfortable using it.

I'm open to learning new languages, but learning new languages from people who talking nothing but trash about C does not inspire confidence. Nobody who loves unix says "you need to try Windows." At the same time, Windows lovers trash Unix. So the two schools remain separate.

if you want to sell Rust, find people who like C who will recommend Rust and shut everybody else up, then people who like C will listen.

edit: thought of one, the soles of shoes

Before Rust, C was my preferred language. It's really hard to talk about Rust in a way that doesn't sound like talking trash about C, because Rust's main reason to exist is preventing safety issues that… people programming in C usually say are not C's fault, so there's nothing to fix there.

The other aspect is that Rust has been developed recently, and didn't have to deal with all the legacy constraints of C. The features that Rust has would be mostly boring compared to modern GC or scripting languages, but they're notable for being in a language that can be as low-level as C. Comparing them directly to C does like trashing C — namespaced modules instead of textual inclusion, macro preprocessor based on AST (do-while tricks not needed), no headers, no need for build scripts in most programs, package management that works on Windows and macOS too, etc. Many other languages have this stuff, but C doesn't, so they're an interesting upgrade from C just because C is so old.