You keep using that word, random. I don't think it means what you think it means.
A coin toss is random. C picking up for the stuff we did in the eighties is not random. Lisp losing traction after the AI winter is not random. Javascript gaining traction with the web is not random.
That the creation of C was effected by random events (the experiences of Ken Thompson, the position of AT&T, the decision to provide the source, etc), does not mean that the success was random.
The success was logical and repeatable given the needs of the era and how the language came to be. To put it in another way, if another language had taken the role of C in the industry at the time, it would have been pretty similar to C, and with external qualifications (availability of source, portability, etc) similar to C.
From this aspect, the (random) fact that it was C after all and not some other C-like language, doesn't matter at all. The language that would have filled C's role would have quacked like C, and that is the non-random, and substantial part.
Read the "Worse is better" for some background.
Why is a coin toss any more random than a specific language gaining traction? It's called "(extreme) sensitivity to initial conditions." Many of which are neither observable nor predictable.
Because my argument was not about a "specific" language.
It was about C-capability language gaining and Lisp-capability language losing ground at that era.
That the C-capability language was C itself, well, that be more or less random.
But that people DID need a portable, close to the metal, constrained with regards to memory use, pointer using, simple to create compilers for, close to assembly language at the time because CPUs and memory were constrained, that was not random, that was a necessity.
And, no, there wasn't "extreme sensitivity to initial conditions" to that. The initial conditions varied at the ten odd years it took for the language to gain traction. And Lisps (including CL, Clojure etc) have been going up and down since the early sixties. It's not like some initial condition set the tone, tons of decisions, several of them important and with predictable consequences set the tone.
And why didn't Fortran win? It meets these requirements. Didn't Forth exist back then too? That meets these requirements.
That is, the part where I wrote:
my argument was not about a "specific" language. It was about C-capability language gaining and Lisp-capability language losing ground at that era. That the C-capability language was C itself, well, that be more or less random.
Either the languages competing were close to what was needed for the machines of the era and the dynamics of the marker (in which case they were more or less similar and which one won was random) or the languages had very different characteristics (in which case which "style" of languages won can be explained).
Languages close together (e.g C and Pascal) won or lost for less significant and more random reasons than the ones that led whole language families to win or lose.
But then:
> But this is not random, it's because of various forces at play, that made Y more widely known and X less so.
Where "various forces" is furious handwaving for the sheer randomness that made that set available to you. And let's say in a slightly different history that set is slightly different (but still contains your current choice), how do you know you would have ended up the same?
But perhaps I am being lamentably simple minded. Every decision you make is deliberate and justifiable.