[quietbritishjim]

> your argument involves survivorship bias - just because a technology has been around a while doesn't make it superior.

That sentence did not end the way I expected given its start.

Survivorship bias does imply that old (surviving) standards are unusually good. That's because standards from the time would have a range of suffering qualities, and the really exceptionally good ones are much more likely to survive in use a very long time.

[dwattttt]

The potential problem though is that the surviving standard may have been the best for a reason that's no longer relevant.

There are certainly decisions that have been made over the last 30 years that don't make sense in light of today's storage/power/ubiquity-of-connection that are just incumbent now.

[inglor_cz]

For example, the inherent unsafety of many C operations and a long list of undefined behaviors in the language, which was meant to improve compile times on long forgotten processors whose performance would no longer suffice to manage a LED lightbulb.

At least we can slowly displace C with other languages, but those limitations were already obsolete in the early 1990s, and we are still wading through countless CVEs caused by them.