I think it's funny you disregard historical accuracy in a presentation about
the legacy of a language where the author looks "at historical examples to set the stage" with an image of "the History of Programming Languages." You're really grasping at straws trying to argue actual truth or historical evidence aren't relevant in such a post. Worse, any reader reading such things would assume the person did
some research on it.
Then, from that point, almost everything the author says about C's history, purpose, and effect were wrong. The only thing correct is everything in the room at the time was written in C [probably]. Which is actually meaningless given it's a historical accident far as the language itself goes.
So C's legacy is that most, mainstream OS's are written in C. The reason? Thompson and Ritchie used C for UNIX plus shared it with lots of people with poor hardware. That's it. It wasn't designed, it wasn't intentionally portable, it wasn't better than anything then or now... nothing really about C itself justified it sticking around. Purveying such myths makes people think it's technically superior and that we should keep investing into it and similar languages for system use. Very damaging myth. So, I counter it everywhere I see it.
"If you're going to spend four sentences speaking about a core language, that is still in active use, that the audience will have heard of then C is a far better goto language than any of the ones listed above."
I can bring up C without lying about it's history, portability, and so on. The author was probably mislead by others rather than intentionally doing it, though. Hence the need for these comments.
"That decade abended years ago. They are no longer germane to a discussion at a conference in 2015, unless you're deep diving in language lineage."
Many are still around, in commercial use, and some updated. Still better than C at robust, systems programming. I agree the author doesn't really need to go into them nor did I ask that in original comment. Just that any statements are accurate in a post about history and legacy. This is why I didn't gripe about "C++ also codified the ideas of zero-cost abstractions," which existed before C++. Yet, C++ brought them to widespread attention. Probably the author's intent and so no gripe from me.
Didn't you consider the fact that I left the rest of the write-up alone in my comment? That it might be for a reason I had lazer-like focus on the inaccuracies in the C entry rather than attacking the presentation as a whole. I get what the article is about and that's why it should maintain historical accuracy more than most.