> It was designed as a language for a confident kernel hacker working close to hardware, but ended up as a general-purpose programming language for the entire O

> It was designed as a language for a confident kernel hacker working close to hardware, but ended up as a general-purpose programming language for the entire OS, and it's not the best fit for that role. C is a classic case where good enough was so good that many tries at perfect couldn't unseat it. I never felt like C was a bad tool in the 80s and at least early 90s - in many cases it was better than the alternatives which would result in slow software or would impose difficult constraints (Pascal string limits and array semantics vs. C's strings and buffers). I never thought much about C as a "kernel hacking" language because I was writing software for MS-DOS where systems programming was calling bios routines or intercepting interrupts and doing unholy things. I guess I just saw C as better than Pascal, compiled BASIC, COBOL and slow interpeted languages. When I moved to Unix, C just was the low friction way...