&gt; The question is, why are there not more languages that have the same paradigm, but also add basic memory safety, avoid spurious undefined behavior, provide namespaces, with a non-stupid standard library, etc.?<p>You mean Algol, NEWP, Mesa, PL&#x2F;I, PL&#x2F;M, Modula-2, Ada and similar?<p>A few of them are older than C.