Yeah, it's not that the hurdles pointed out in this article are wrong, but IMO the jump from "it's very hard" to "it's impossible" isn't convincingly argued. In discussions of the future of C, something along the lines of "C is never going away" is frequently said, which I think is both right and wrong, depending on what precisely you mean by "going away". If you ask me, C is not going away in the same way that Fortran never went away: it's still hugely important for numerical kernels used extremely widely every day, and software like sqlite will continue to be important. But for C as a culturally defining language in computing, I think the tide is already turning.