&quot;C certainly wasn’t the first high level language, but it was one of the first to take portability seriously&quot;<p>That&#x27;s totally wrong. The C philosophy and structure were almost 100% due to BCPL with minor changes. BCPL was portable <i>by accident</i> due to its simplicity. They just got rid of every good feature of a systems language to the point that the remainder, barely a language, could be put on about anything.<p>Thompson tweaked BCPL into B to make it work on his terrible PDP-7. That wouldn&#x27;t work on a PDP-11 so more tweaks by Ritchie into C. That couldn&#x27;t even handle UNIX alpha so that added structs. That&#x27;s C 1.0. A year later, people started porting it because it was barely a language &amp; could fit in their hardware. All that was in my link about its history from documents and people that made it.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;UAQaWuWG" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;UAQaWuWG</a><p>&quot;Before C there was assembly language&quot;<p>Also wrong and contradicting his claim about HLL&#x27;s before C. As pjmlp listed, there were numerous systems languages <i>in production</i> before C was designed. It&#x27;s not like we made a huge leap of faith into structured HLL with C. We actually cut out maintenance, reliability, readability, integration, etc capabilities of <i>existing</i> languages (esp CPL) to iterate into C. And, later on with good hardware, people started adding many of those back because C was garbage that led to all kinds of problems.<p>We can certainly accept a need to learn C language and tooling for working with existing OS or app code. That&#x27;s called legacy system effect. However, we should <i>never</i> push false justifications for that which detract from superior language design that would&#x27;ve enabled more robust, maintainable, productive development. We can accept both the what and the why of C at the same time.<p>As a side effect, more people might explore features of C alternatives to build the next, best, systems language. Wirth has been doing that for years. Ada still gets updated with one version able to prove absence of many, runtime errors at compile time. Clojure is showing LISP&#x27;s advantages and it was once used for OS&#x27;s w&#x2F; incredible flexibility + robustness. So on and so forth. Gotta counter the C disinformation and misinformation so enough people know why they should do the opposite of it so some [more] eventually will.<p>Note: There&#x27;s also the value of removing inaccuracies in historical writings that have negative effects. Mere editing and revision. I hear that&#x27;s important to some people, too.