[stevewepay]

Not that error handling is unimportant, but my opinion is that C is about focusing on resource usage, and keeping very close track over giving back any resource you take, including memory, etc. If you do that, then the number of hard-to-debug runtime bugs drops significantly.

[pjmlp]

Many languages of that era were about it and did it safer, C just happens to be the one that won the market.