“A damn stupid thing to do”–the origins of C

The title is total clickbait. That quote has nothing to do with C.

How much better or popular would C be if it never had some of its most egregious flaws such as pointer/array decay, unsafe string functions, signed char, switch fallthrough, short/long/int, etc.?

It is true that in almost every case, the reason for inventing a new language did not in fact justify anything like the amount of effort involved. Languages get created anyway, for insufficient reasons, and once in a blue moon a miracle happens, and the language takes off.<p>Excellence is absolutely not obligatory to get a miracle, but failings do often help prevent one. The most interesting cases are not the miracles, which are each <i>sui generis</i>, but the near misses like Pascal, Ada, and Lisp.

“<i>This accomplishment, by an amateur, caught the attention of Lord Halsbury, managing director of the National Research and Development Corporation, who soon recruited Strachey to spearhead the government’s efforts to promote practical applications of the rapid developments in computer science taking place at British universities.</i>”<p>Is anything akin to this happening today? It seems to me we are currently resigned to the idea that only corporations can successfully play that role today. Am I missing something?

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I was just reading this article yesterday very interesting article !!