On the history and justification of the C programming language
This completely misses the key factor: (most) computers were not big or fast enough to run high level languages back then. So for people who only got to use small computers, they had to code in assembler (or cross-compile on a big computer).<p>So anyone who could come up with a high(er) level language that would run on smaller machines was a winner. It meant the difference between a life of misery hacking assembler or a life of milk and honey coding in a high level language. There was no &quot;Oh, let&#x27;s be stupid and omit &lt;safety feature du jour&gt; from our language&quot;. It was more like &quot;Wow, I got a compiler to run on that PDP-11&#x2F;20 and it only had to be split into 5 passes to fit into core&quot;.<p>There were many many simple languages back then that occupied this niche. Only C has survived into the modern era (thanks to open source compilers and Unix and Microsoft&#x27;s adoption of C for WindowsNT). If things had turned out differently we would be complaining about the lack of safety in code stil being written in Bliss or IMP or PL&#x2F;S.