What makes you think someone else would not step in instead? There was a similar argument when Ritchie died: "we would not have C, we would not have software".

What makes you think someone else would not step in instead? There was a similar argument when Ritchie died: "we would not have C, we would not have software". Well, maybe we would not have C, but for sure we would have (and already had) some other programming languages.