[PythonicAlpha]

I liked Modula 2 much more than Pascal or C. (for those, that don't know it:) Modula 2 was the successor of Pascal from Niklaus Wirth. It had cleaner syntax and many other good features. Its successor, Oberon, was object oriented. [1]

But the culprit (and that belongs to all Pascal descendants, as it seems (at least until Modula 2)) was, that the libraries where not very helpful. The standard libraries for Pascal (not the extended ones from Borland Pascal or others) and from Modula 2 where a pain to work with and did not cover the developer needs. I guess, that was one reason for the downfall of Pascal -- some niches (eg. Borland Pascal) where successful, but they lacked the broad covering. C had it all: A syntax, that was popular by many, because it could be typed fast (not everybody will agree that it is an advantage) and a library that covered everything you needed. Also with printf it had a neat solution (according to that time) for a problem, that was really cumbersome to deal with in Pascal or Modula 2. Also you could write C code for one machine and port it rather easily to another, because the libraries had nearly the same API.

I account some good part of the initial success of C to the standard C library. After that it was just a question of publicity.

Also one mistake of Wirth might have been, that he took different names for his languages. I guess, the languages would have done a little better, if he called it Pascal2 or Pascal++ and after that Pascal++15 or so .... but that is the other problem: Good engineers are usually bad marketeers.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-2

[caf]

I really like the insight that printf() was C's original killer feature. It makes a lot of sense.

[PythonicAlpha]

I think, it was just one top feature of the first standard C library. It made printing a lot easier. In standard Pascal or Modula 2, you still had to print every single data type with its own special "WriteX" statement. Even there was a distinction between "WriteString" and "WriteLine", the second wrote a string and added a Newline after it (I am not sure in the moment, if it really took a string or just wrote the NL). In printing to screen, some languages of those days where really spartan.

[kjs3]

That's a really interesting insight. Wirth, et al, spent a lot of time delivering on really deep libs that solved CompSciIsh problems (lot's of ADTs) and not so much doing stuff people really needed to do in the real world.