[pjmlp]

C was a language designed by two developers without background in language design that got lucky, because Bell Labs wasn't allowed to sell UNIX thus it ended up licensing it for a symbolic price to universities.

C was hardly efficient in the 80s micro-computers, and outside Bell Labs people were doing compiler optimization research in languages like PL.8 and similar.

Had Bell Labs been allowed to sell UNIX and history would certainly looked much different.

[e3b0c]

When talking about "efficient communication" between the computer and the programmer, it does not necessarily imply the characteristics of the runtime performance.

For instance, Fortran is very performant in numerical computing, even outperforming C, but it has difficulty in accessing I/O mapped registers or implementing an interrupt handler, a jump table, or just cleaning a particular chunk of memory addresses.

[pjmlp]

Another urban legend from C yearly days. There was plenty of research in system languages since the early 60's outside Bell Labs, with OSes being written in Algol, Pascal and PL/I variants.

"Oh, it was quite a while ago. I kind of stopped when C came out. That was a big blow. We were making so much good progress on optimizations and transformations. We were getting rid of just one nice problem after another. When C came out, at one of the SIGPLAN compiler conferences, there was a debate between Steve Johnson from Bell Labs, who was supporting C, and one of our people, Bill Harrison, who was working on a project that I had at that time supporting automatic optimization...The nubbin of the debate was Steve's defense of not having to build optimizers anymore because the programmer would take care of it. That it was really a programmer's issue.... Seibel: Do you think C is a reasonable language if they had restricted its use to operating-system kernels? Allen: Oh, yeah. That would have been fine. And, in fact, you need to have something like that, something where experts can really fine-tune without big bottlenecks because those are key problems to solve. By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are ... basically not taught much anymore in the colleges and universities."

-- Fran Allen interview, Excerpted from: Peter Seibel. Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming