Some Were Meant for C: The Endurance of an Unmanageable Language [pdf]
This is another article overanalyzing the success of C, when in fact the reason for the success of C is very simple and obvious: Unix was free and in a lucky position in 1973; Unix got popular; C is the language of Unix; therefore C got popular. There is no inherent benefit in C that, for example, a somewhat modified version of Pascal or Algol wouldn't have inherited. And these kinds of articles always ignore the fact that in the past decade or so, C and C++ have been <i>declining</i> in popularity. By and large, new programmers are not learning C the way they were in the '90s. For better or worse (personally, I think, for the better), they're starting with JavaScript, Python, Ruby, or even PHP.<p>I'm highly skeptical of the conclusion that what we need is a new safer implementation of C, too. Switching to a new compiler is a <i>very</i> high burden for a lot of projects, and at the end of the day they're still left with all the problems of C, like header files, no namespaces, terrible standard library, etc. etc. (Even adding compiler <i>switches</i> is a high burden, which is why Linux distros took so long to widely deploy basic things like -fstack-protector.) By contrast, switching to a new language (or incrementally writing new components in a new language, which is how this always goes in practice) is <i>also</i> a very high burden, but the benefits are larger: you don't have to deal with all the problems of C.<p>In my view, this is why safer versions of C have repeatedly failed over the years, while new languages have flourished. Migration to a new language <i>or a new compiler</i> is expensive no matter what, so teams will only do it if they see enough benefit to justify the expense of doing so. Merely adding some amount of safety to C isn't worth it, but the large safety <i>and</i> productivity gains you can get from a different language can be.