At my former company wsk Messtechnik I was the one, who does a majority of all the development work in hard- and software technology.
In PASE, I am part of a much larger development team and do mainly HW development.
Prefered programming language: C++. Only in cases this would be slight overkill (8051-based microcontrollers) I am also using C. And if it is really neccessay, I also do modifications on Basic-programming code. But one time I reprogrammed a data acquisition software written in Basic in C, because understanding the Basic source code would have taken more time.
Besides that, I also know Pascal and have worked with some assembler languages (68000-assembler is almost like C, truely!). Also compiler sometimes make mistakes...
Why is 68000-assembly language almost C? Very easy to explain: Motorola wanted a 16/32-Bit-processor, but they were only experienced in building 8-Bit-processors. The mistakes Intel has made in the design of the 8086-architecture (drilling a 8-Bit-CPU to 16 bit) should not be made, and so Motorola ported one of the most popular 32-Bit-Processors of that time to a single chip design: the PDP-11-Processor (at that time it was a complete board!)
And how developed C? Also very easy, some guys had a game, which ran quite well on a mainframe. But they wanted to play the game on the PDP-11. Was does a programmer, if the two assembly languages differ too much? He develops a macro language, which can be adopted by both assemblers. So the game was re-written in the new macro language and ran on both machines. Later the macro language developed further, and one day "C" was born. Evil tongues (Niklaus Wirth, creator of the pascal language) called C "a shugared assembler", what is not completely wrong, but in the meantime, this assembler runs on anything working with a CPU...
The large advantage of C in my eyes ist the compact code in addition to a nearly universal ported run time library. It is the great benefit, that this run time library is very homogenous over a lot of systems. This - and not only the language itself - allows the easy portability.