1) Whatever language you are most proficient in, that is often the most efficient tool for _you_ to get the job done right.
2) PHP is largely C for people who should never program in C (or PHP ;-). Depending on the nature of what you are doing, and if you use some basic support libraries (and the author mentions a few), your code needn't be that much more work to get done than any other language. In reality, it's not the typing in the code that tends to matter anyway.
3) If you are, for whatever reason, interfacing with a lot of systems components or C API's, there can often be a pretty big win using C as you avoid all the pain of language impedance mismatch.
4) Depending on what it is measured against and the nature of the problem, C can often be significantly more efficient, not just in terms of CPU, but the all important memory consumption these days. Depending on the problem, that can be highly highly relevant.
5) Portability. Okay, you can stop laughing now. ;-) Seriously though, if you talk to mobile game developers who've tried it, C and C++ tend to be the best languages for targeting a plethora of platforms. That goes double or triple for embedded systems. It's really not that hard these days to have very portable C/C++ code, and platforms that insist on making C a second class citizen tend to do themselves more harm than good (even Android ultimately relented).
Now, that's not to say that I think everyone should be doing their web projects in C, but depending on the context (the problem, the available tools, and the parties involved), it might well be a good choice.
1) Whatever language you are most proficient in, that is often the most efficient tool for _you_ to get the job done right.
2) PHP is largely C for people who should never program in C (or PHP ;-). Depending on the nature of what you are doing, and if you use some basic support libraries (and the author mentions a few), your code needn't be that much more work to get done than any other language. In reality, it's not the typing in the code that tends to matter anyway.
3) If you are, for whatever reason, interfacing with a lot of systems components or C API's, there can often be a pretty big win using C as you avoid all the pain of language impedance mismatch.
4) Depending on what it is measured against and the nature of the problem, C can often be significantly more efficient, not just in terms of CPU, but the all important memory consumption these days. Depending on the problem, that can be highly highly relevant.
5) Portability. Okay, you can stop laughing now. ;-) Seriously though, if you talk to mobile game developers who've tried it, C and C++ tend to be the best languages for targeting a plethora of platforms. That goes double or triple for embedded systems. It's really not that hard these days to have very portable C/C++ code, and platforms that insist on making C a second class citizen tend to do themselves more harm than good (even Android ultimately relented).
Now, that's not to say that I think everyone should be doing their web projects in C, but depending on the context (the problem, the available tools, and the parties involved), it might well be a good choice.