> by the time C was released, there were already literally dozens of programming languages Hundreds, actually, I was there, but writing a compiler in COBOL or

> by the time C was released, there were already literally dozens of programming languages Hundreds, actually, I was there, but writing a compiler in COBOL or an OS kernel in FORTRAN would have been quite an exercise. For those kinds of domains, there were few alternatives and assembler was still a common choice. C was certainly an improvement on that.