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by pjmlp 396 days ago
Being at Google helped, not that Alef, Limbo, Newsqueak and Oberon-2 were that huge commercial successes, and there is also the question how much influence would have C had in the industry if AT&T would be selling it from the get go, instead of the way UNIX and C were freely distributed across universities.

Many times it isn't the quality of the programming language alone, rather external factors that trigger its adoption.