Regarding your last point, while the ideas of Smalltalk and especially Lisp are influential, C may have just as much a claim to influence. Both Lisp and C are beautiful abstractions, the assembly languages of two abstract machines. While Lisp is powerful, C is such a profound success because the C abstract machine is very close to how computers actually work.
Re:Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died
by JoachimSchipper on Thursday October 13, 2011 @10:18AM
(#3107206)
More properly: "while Lisp is powerful, the C abstract machine has largely shaped how computers actually work".
I keep hearing that computers are diverging from the kind of architecture C maps to, though. What of that?
See for example: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/reduceron/
I'm fairly sure much of both Delphi and VB are written in C.
I wonder what the Turbo Pascal compilers were written in...
The original Macintosh was programmed in assembler. As was MS-DOS and Windows up to version 3.1 (perhaps even in important parts in Win95?). The big boom of computing and the GUI had already happened. In the late 80s Turbo Pascal was really popular: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal
For GUI programming there was (and is) the Pascal dialect Delphi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarcadero_Delphi
What would the world look like if C would have been never invented? I guess our browsers would simply be coded in Turbo Pascal dialect.
And Visual Basic is still huge (#12 on langpop.com). Also someone could reasonably argue that from the concept and ideas SmallTalk and Lisp were way more influential than C.
That said, I feel a bit dirty to make this argument. Dennis Ritchie should be praised for his accomplishments.