I think I would go a little further than that. There was a point in the past where machine architectures were so alien that even getting your favourite languag

I think I would go a little further than that. There was a point in the past where machine architectures were so alien that even getting your favourite language bootstrapped on it was a major challenge. The inflection point came when "everything became a PDP-11/VAX" which at least made formerly expensive features affordable and set off a wave of innovation that required some kind of standard (especially the Motorola 68000 and the Intel 386). Now we are so much further along, everything is starting to look like Unix in one form or another. To me, it wouldn't have mattered if the operations systems had converged on NT or VMS, the underlying demand was for Unix like systems and that is where we ended up, to the point where Microsoft have embraced it with WSL and all the big, proprietary OSs of the past are dead or irrelevent. Sure, the ABI problem is real, but 40 years ago this outcome wasn't guaranteed and it's turned out to be absolutely magic in terms of the proliferation of new languages. From my perspective, everything "having to speak C" at a low level is a feature, not a bug. It might not be a perfect model, but it works and a lot of people are familiar with it. That de-facto standardization is what makes modern computing possible.