You're right, C is the most popular language with the least amount of magic between you and assembly. It's a useful balance of abstractions on top of assembly without a total loss of the processor model.

This isn't less convincing to me, I would never argue that someone learn C instead of all other languages. But I do believe that knowing C makes you a better programmer in all (current popular production) languages.

Re: your point about systems programming not advancing...I didn't mean to imply that C was "perfect" (in the Latin sense, meaning "done, finished"), just that it's the best we have for many things.

I do really like Go, and wish I could use it more, for non-personal projects.