I know C/C#/Python/Rust/Javascript.

After a decade of using C I am still not totally sure if I didn't dangle a pointer somwhere in precisely the wrong way to create havoc. And yeah, that means I have to get better, etc. But that is not the point. The point is, that even with a lot of experience in the language you can still easily shoot yourself into the foot and don't even notice it.

Meanwhile after a month of using Rust I felt confident that I didn't shoot myself in the foot, because I know what the compilers e.g. ownership guarantuees. While in C shooting myself into the foot happen quite often in Rust I would have to specifically find a way to shoot myself into the foot without the compiler yelling at me, and quite frankly I havent found such a way yet.

Javascript is odd, because the typesystem has quite a few footguns in it. This is why such things like Elm or Typescript exist: to avoid these footguns.

I don't want to take away from the accomplishments of C, and I still like the language, but to claim it is equally likely in all languages to shoot yourself into the foot is not true.

The “C competing with assembly” meme was very specific to microcomputer game and operating system development, not more general microcomputer application development, and not to minicomputer or mainframe development.

But anyway, we were talking about the real world software on microcomputers, not just standards in the abstract. With that in mind, I think TP/BP is a better example of Pascal in the wild than anything Wirth ever made.

Or Fortran, Algol, Lisp, Cobol, Basic, Pascal, ...

He had some bug where in one place it returned to the start of the string, executed it, and kept going. The end result just happened to be a nop. Had been like that in production for a couple of years.

The reason why C won had little to do with its advantages as a language over the competitors. It just happened to be the systems language for Unix, which was the winner in the early OS wars on microcomputers (for unrelated reasons). Once it became so established, there was a positive feedback loop: you would write portable code in C, because you knew that it was the fastest language that most platforms out there would support. And then any new platform would offer a C compiler, because they wanted to be able to run all the existing C code out there. And so, here were are.

Those of us who have always known about less dangerous 'system' languages (Pascal probably being the most popular) lament the fact that so much code got written in C instead.

It wasn't inevitable. It was preventable! It just didn't happen that way for reasons which are largely historical.

I don't work for the Rust Evangelism Strike Force, my main project is written in (as little) C (as possible), but I beg anyone who has a choice: use something else! Rust is... fine, Zig is promising. Ada still works!

Writing out the set {Python, Pascal, Algol, Rust, Go} tempts me to say uncharitable things about your understanding of the profession, but I accept you were just being snarky so I'll just gesture in the direction of how $redacted that is.

Why would a huge C++ (not C, btw) codebase with roots going back to the 90s be rewritten in any other language?

And in fact how is the language Unreal Engine written in relevant to C having footguns?

Go (golang)

Using defer to unlock locks can lead to some fun deadlocks if you don't realize the issue with the scope, and it's completely unintuitive to someone with experience with other implementations of similar concepts.

the whole var/:=/= assignment combined with the error handling style and the shorthand is another one

Don't understand your second point.

   select {

       case <-ch1:

       case <-ch2: 
    }

I'm sure there's a lot of important things that rely on COBOL, but by most definitions of "critical", I think this is way off the mark.

The OS kernel for nearly every PC and server on earth is written in C.

Almost every electronic device on earth complicated enough to require software is probably running at least some firmware written in C.

I think those both outnumber ATMs by a hefty margin.

C#

But please, nothing about using unsafe.