And it was a great relief compared to my experience in, say, Pascal. You'll need a fairly advanced type system (Rust, Haskell, ...) to express the kind of stuf

And it was a great relief compared to my experience in, say, Pascal. You'll need a fairly advanced type system (Rust, Haskell, ...) to express the kind of stuff we wanted to do with static types and a very good compiler to make it efficient. We didn't have that until maybe mid-90es and trying to do it without that either led to very inefficient code or to breaking the type system. So C was [mostly] great, but today we have better options.