The author's next love affair will be Go, and he won't be back. I see it as a very real successor to C. I have written about 6k lines of Go (on a project that I had previously written in C) and I'm deliriously happy with it (partly because its just more fun to write than C). Granted, you can't write a dylib or kernel, but it sounds like for the author's case it would be a good fit.