&quot;Take away all C&#x2F;C++ code and we have nothing or almost nothing.&quot;<p>In that meaning, it&#x27;s true but only as an accident of history that has little to nothing to do with C&#x27;s design itself.<p>&quot;If by economic you mean &quot;pragmatic&quot; and &quot;engineering considerations&quot;, then yes.&quot;<p>BCPL was whatever compiled on a machine from the 1960&#x27;s. C was what compiled on a machine from the 1970&#x27;s. ALGOL was engineered. C was what compiled and ran fast on old hardware. That&#x27;s it.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;UAQaWuWG" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;UAQaWuWG</a><p>The rest was social factors. Even when alternative languages did better, most people didn&#x27;t adopt them. Most buyers also paid for performance per dollar totally ignoring reliability, security, maintenance, and so on. Unless you argue these don&#x27;t matter, then the dominance of C and UNIX is once again due to something other than their technical merits. Plus, the fact that their problems stayed in... intentionally... once better hardware came online while other players fixed them in various ways.