<i>"The language grew up with one of the rewritings of the system and, as such, it became perfect for writing systems. ... It became the perfect language for what it was designed to do."</i><p>Really? Perfect? Why then are there entire books filled with "C gotchas" or "C traps and pitfalls"?<p>The language is an inconsistent, inelegant, error-prone mess that has left us with decades of serious bugs and security vulnerabilities. Yet Thompson describes it as "perfect". Sounds like he's been letting all the prizes he got get to his head.<p>Sure. The language was very influential, and much of the software we use every day was and still is written in it. That doesn't make it perfect, just popular -- often for legacy reasons, not because it's "perfect for writing systems".