Sentence:  Compared to other modern languages, C is much less forgiving, much more terse, and generally much more ill tempered. However, it is about as close to programming on the <WSD>bare metal</WSD> as you can get while still using a well-supported language with good library support for everything from numeric calculations to graphics. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  A runtime environment where little to no abstraction is available: usually employing a low-level programming language, without access to any operating system facilities, and interfacing hardware directly.