Re:This shouldn't have happened: A vulnerability postmortem
by staticassertion on Thursday December 02, 2021 @10:16AM
(#29417131)
I would guess that a huge part of C's popularity is UNIX. I think a number of other languages could have easily competed in the other areas ie: thin abstraction.
"C people were doers" is probably reductive, but C and C++ had an alchemy of factors that made something like, say, LISP or Erlang not be where they are.
If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say the most dominant factors are the language runtime's portability, the language's features allowing for relatively low-level access to the backing hardware (i.e. the thinness of the abstraction between C memory access and microprocessor read-write instructions means things like memory maps or "magic addresses" that trigger hardware effects on mutation could just be handed to user code), and the compatibility of the runtime with what came to be (for a ton of reasons) a dominant model of computation in the commercial and consumer space: the x86 architecture.