[_ph_]

I have put together systems of considerable complexity (>100k lines), and am working professional programmer for almost 2 decades. Most of my work does not involve C, but various "safe" languages.

There were better alternatives already available at the beginning of the 70s, and certainly when most of the software was written that we are using today. Just to name a few I am familiar of with:

- Pascal being as old as C, and later on

- Modula 2, Oberon, the Oberon System was completely implemented in Oberon

- Eiffel

and of course, today:

- Rust

- Go

So, even back then, there were more safe alternatives to C around. C gained more popularity, and consequently the tooling gave it some edge, but there would have been alternatives. Of course, when you have a nice debugged C program, that is something worth keeping. And as a consequence, for mostly historic reasons, a lot of our current infrastructure is built on top of C - but that alone does not mean that C was the perfect or even the right tool to build all of this upon.