C is much closer to the machine and very fast. When I learnt C I went to the book store. There were two C books (K&R and Byte Books C) and one Lisp book. I learnt both. Lisp was fun but, at the time, I never appreciated the introspection. It was only when, a long long time later, I learnt Python and remembered the ability to iterate the elements of a class and thought how handy that was for some programs.

C could more easily access the lower level resources as well.

I still wonder why one of these, like forth, lisp later Python did not become the standard command line interpreters whereas it would never have been C, and I have written very featured C interpreters.