Programming "only" in an environment of C and it's friends - Being a toolsmith

Hi,

in writing computer code, the language C has obvious advantages over
other languages ("fads"):
It's close to hardware. It's perfect for operating system interfacing.

You can do anything with it.
Of course this often means creating tools and "programs that write
programs".

A good example is lex or equivalents for lexical analysis, etc.

See http://foldoc.org/toolsmith


I'd rather write C code than Perl-scripts or Python.
But on the other hand I do believe C does require a lot of work, for
which other languages such as Python have already got a lot of built-
in facilities.
I guess that C and tools and a desire for "power" will automatically
lead to C++. C has a notorious lack of GUI libraries (or can you tell
me a good equivalent to something like FLTK and qt?)

My question:
Is it feasible to do everything in C?
Example: Could Unix (or Linux) system administration be done without
Perl and shell-scripting, but using only C. What consequences would
that have?

What languages do you use, and how do you decide what to use?
And how does C fit into the picture?
Thanks.
.

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