Well, that's a better answer than I was responding to. I think I disagree a bit on your response to #2, though. Sure, other languages have also contributed mightily to the design of later languages. Some of them might have contributed more than C. OTOH, they haven't contributed nearly as much to the design of libraries and runtimes that are also important for a working engineer to understand. Programs written in any language are loaded into memory in a manner designed to accommodate C. The primary interface between userspace code written in any language and the kernel is via direct syscalls or libc, which were likewise designed with C's needs in mind. When those APIs do change, it's the C definitions that change and other languages are left on their own to parse the new definitions. So it's true that other languages have been just as influential from a computer scientist's perspective, but from a working engineer's perspective no other language comes close.