Plenty of things on that list are better than C in key ways and pre-date Ada. Plus, many issues with C existed due to hardware limitations. The C community could&#x27;ve been improving the situation gradually by changing the bad features as hardware improved plus importing good things from other languages. Would&#x27;ve required gradual rewrites of what depended on it but would&#x27;ve been worth it. Or merely switching to and integrating better options like Pascal&#x2F;Modula line with safety &amp; maintenance benefits.<p>Instead, they continued building on the foundation of quicksand with so many systems integrity and availability lost as a result. Lost <i>way, too easily</i> due to developers inability to safety do common things. Things that were safe or easy in alternative languages on 1960&#x27;s-1980&#x27;s era hardware. Did I mention this was true in 2015 still on systems with 64 cores?<p>Least Stroustroup made an attempt to bring in advanced features into C. Substantially improved it in resulting quality on average but still showed how much a bad foundation hurts. Stuff like Modula-3 managed high runtime efficiency, compile time efficiency, safety, integration, and readability all at once.<p>So, existence of alternatives providing a better path certainly mattered. That all of it was mostly ignored taught important lessons to future people trying to improve IT. Fortunately, some learned them and now we have better stuff coming along with higher chance of adoption. Plus, significant improvements to existing stuff here and there.