I think all the things you've objected to are 'local minimums' of some cost function. We have Windows because it was popular, then snowballed. We have C becaus

I think all the things you've objected to are 'local minimums' of some cost function. We have Windows because it was popular, then snowballed. We have C because it was the best systems language for the 'best' computers of its day, the PDP's. It seems that between people clustering to a local minimum, and momentum, we often get 'stuck' on less than perfect technologies. I'm sure if we started all over again, we would encounter similar problems.