C has followed a slow and steady progression from being a high-level assembler to a general-purpose language with a strong systems focus, becoming the lingua franca that ultimately holds the software universe together. In over four decades the idioms and work practices around the language have changed. But only a little. What if we look at the language from the perspective of other trends? Without trying to fake or shoehorn the language into another paradigm, what practices — big and small — can we bring to it from the worlds of C++, OOP, functional programming, TDD and others?