The funny thing about gcr's comment is that I posted ESR's review of UNIX Hater's Handbook here before. He agreed with a good chunk of it while noting other stuff changed or was ranting. As for your comment, I came to C after using alternative, system languages that compiled faster, crashed less, and ran fast. After I figured out basics of C & read secure coding books, I said "F#$@ this!" It was an unnecessary and horrible development experience. So, I coded up a 4GL that let me develop in industrial BASIC that compiled to C apps with checks in to use their compilers and libraries. Macro'd out boilerplate. People thought my "C code" was fast and thorough but I never wrote in that garbage language except prototyping the tool. (Long gone so don't ask.) My application areas were OS-level stuff, games, AI, networked apps, and GUI apps. Shows how easy it would've been to ditch given I sucked at compiler design.

Eventually, I discovered how it was created, that most proponents claims weren't accurate depiction, and did this write-up. Glad you enjoyed that I kept it close to subject material from its inventors. Meanwhile, the C inventors went onto design, with Pike's help, a better language that solves most of C's problems while maintaining a Wirth-like level of safety and development. Pick up Go language if you want to know what that experience is like. Personally, I'm more for a subset of Modula-3 with Rust's dynamic safety, SPARK Ada's extensions for correctness, and macro's for DSL, productivity benefits. Or efficient functional one with similar properties.