Those who did something include the developers of Burroughs MCP, who used Algol 60; the developers of MULTICS, who used PL/1; the developers of Symbolics Genera, who used Lisp; and the developers of Oberon, who used the language Oberon.

I go along with historical accident to account for Unix's success, though Richard Gabriel thought it was a case of Worse Is Better trumping The Right Thing.