Yes, C's string handling is pretty crappy (especially given how important a data type strings are in Unix). And its operator precedence rules aren't always the

Yes, C's string handling is pretty crappy (especially given how important a data type strings are in Unix). And its operator precedence rules aren't always the best. But just like 10 million Elvis fans can't be wrong, neither can a language that is to programming what Elvis, the Beatles, and Michael Jackson put together were to music be anything other than a triumph of engineering. Better string handling or not, just as surely as video killed the radio star at about the same time, C killed the Pascal programmer. And the FORTRAN programmer, and COBOL, and BASIC, and assembler, and pre-1972 Lisp, and all the other old programming languages that are nowadays too obscure for me even to list. And operator precedence or not, every non-Lisp programming language of any popularity today apes C's syntax, not Ada or BASIC or somesuch. I'm not saying C is perfect. I don't even particularly like coding in C; I'm just saying that it just was a huge breakthrough in programming language design at the time it came out, and was overall the best designed language ever to that point (which, Lisp fanatics and Donald Knuth aside, I think most would agree with). Certainly not something you could ever say about JavaScript with a straight face. My point re scripting languages was that if Netscape had wanted to be on the bleeding edge, they still had much better choices. JavaScript is a programming language created in one week, where one of the major design considerations was to be an advertisement for a different programming language, and it shows. It certainly showed in 1995, before we had 20 years, billions of dollars and millions of man-hours invested by all the major companies in optimizing VMs, improving the standard, creating libraries and all the other miscellaneous forms of putting lipstick on a pig.