I too love C. And I would use it over JavaScript any time. But that's mainly because I can't stand JavaScript ;) For prototyping and problems which are just easier to handle in higher level languages I'd go for Python.

I think it's a shame that the client side of the web is basically limited to JS, because seriously, that's the only reason so many people started coding in it in the first place. I believe that if we could, many devs would prefer other languages.

node.js

I was under the impression that application programming using node.js was done primarily in JavaScript...

Yes, on the server, where C also lives.

Right, but people who are using node.js aren't writing C. Of course C comes into play to do the heavy lifting, but we're not talking about infrastructure. Writing a web server and writing a website are two very different problem domains.