I'll bite. When I learnt C I found it charmingly simple and it took me years to realize how deeply broken some aspects are, especially the separate compilation

I'll bite. When I learnt C I found it charmingly simple and it took me years to realize how deeply broken some aspects are, especially the separate compilation circus — programmers working hard to help the compiler and not getting any modularity benefits in return. So suppose C didn't happen. Do you expect the industry at large would have adopted a great language instead? Or some random product of history, half way between PL/I++ to JavaScript?