[Koshkin]

Actually, computer science in general and the theory of programming languages in particular were already very advanced back in the 60s. It’s just people thought little of languages that would have needed gigabytes of memory (or days of run time) for the compiler to do its job.

[jabl]

That's exactly the point the pamphlet I linked to makes. C was far from the state of the art when it was invented, it's only major redeeming quality was that it worked on the shit low-end computers that were available to the inventors back then.

The tragedy wasn't that C was invented, it was fit for purpose then. The tragedy was that as HW evolved beyond the PDP-11 level, unix programming remained stuck at C.