People forget that compilers in the 1980's were expensive.
If you wanted something compiled other than assembly language, your choices were C (1987--gcc could generally bootstrap) and Pascal (1984--mostly TurboPascal) and ... nothing.
Look at what was sitting in Dr Dobbs Journal in the 1980's. People were typing in enormous programs in BASIC(!) in order to play with things like LISP and Prolog. Not a recipe for adoption ...
I remember getting stuck using some Macintosh Lisp thing in 1986/1987--I pined for my OS9 machine and C and the dulcet (not!) grind of it's floppy drive. That says something.
Small-C was probably the only dialect freely available, everything else was either commercial, or came for "free" with an UNIX workstation price tag.
In fact, it was due to Solaris change of heart regarding developers, that some devs started to contribute to GCC.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8988021
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8984454
I have a few editions of Dr Dobbs Journal comparing C compilers, all commercial, GCC was yet to be relevant.
So, what "better" language could you get for that price at that time?
Pascal compilers like Turbo Pascal, for example.
- C compiler
- Assembler
- Linker
- Make
- Grep
- Z (an editor kinda like vi IIRC)
I remember it being able to make very small executables, which meant a lot at that time.
0 - https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_manxAztecClApr88_25693...
"Oh, it was quite a while ago. I kind of stopped when C came out. That was a big blow. We were making so much good progress on optimizations and transformations. We were getting rid of just one nice problem after another. When C came out, at one of the SIGPLAN compiler conferences, there was a debate between Steve Johnson from Bell Labs, who was supporting C, and one of our people, Bill Harrison, who was working on a project that I had at that time supporting automatic optimization...The nubbin of the debate was Steve's defense of not having to build optimizers anymore because the programmer would take care of it. That it was really a programmer's issue....
Seibel: Do you think C is a reasonable language if they had restricted its use to operating-system kernels?
Allen: Oh, yeah. That would have been fine. And, in fact, you need to have something like that, something where experts can really fine-tune without big bottlenecks because those are key problems to solve. By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are ... basically not taught much anymore in the colleges and universities."
-- Fran Allen interview, Excerpted from: Peter Seibel. Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming