Perhaps you missed the part of my comment where I SPECIFICALLY addressed that issue. That is, the part where I wrote: my argument was not about a "specific" l

Perhaps you missed the part of my comment where I SPECIFICALLY addressed that issue. That is, the part where I wrote: my argument was not about a "specific" language. It was about C-capability language gaining and Lisp-capability language losing ground at that era. That the C-capability language was C itself, well, that be more or less random. Either the languages competing were close to what was needed for the machines of the era and the dynamics of the marker (in which case they were more or less similar and which one won was random) or the languages had very different characteristics (in which case which "style" of languages won can be explained). Languages close together (e.g C and Pascal) won or lost for less significant and more random reasons than the ones that led whole language families to win or lose.