https://faculty.nps.edu/dedennin/publications/National%20Com...
Redmond is in WA not CA. If your point is about commercial pressure, not just SV bashing, then please listen to my tale of David Hyatt and grad school friend (Hyatt writing draft code and rewriting five times) from the interview with Lex. That was an academic assignment, not commercial work.
The point is not about Silicon Valley, commercialization of the Web (although as Dorothy Denning observed, the pre-Web Academic Internet was a more secure world only because not many attackers yet), or academic pressure. WiB applies to biology. I have friends at a synth-bio startup, one tweeted humorously the other month about how bad a hack evolution is!
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/670307.Friedrich_A_H...
Did you listen to Eich’s statements acknowledging the errors and also the hypothesis of what would have been if not JavaScript? Since you have done some accounting, what have been the productivity gains and new frontiers opened by C? What is the amortization of damage over the length of delay?
So we don't have to wonder at all, it would have turned out exactly the way it did and the reason is because things like undefined behavior, zero terminated strings, null pointers, etc have positive utility underappreciated by academics.
If C had been designed as a safer language (with even just small improvements that would not have been hard to implement), it would still be widely used and there would be fewer security problems associated with it. It is the Just World Fallacy [0] to assume that the most widespread language became so on its merits and not based on its historical context.
About Ada, it is actually a decade newer than C. In 1982 I was part of a group that was keeping track of its development and had learned C from old Bell Journals. I was able to a buy a book on Ada and the famous K&R C book and decided I preferred simplicity, so I donated the Ada book and dropped out of the study group. It is ironic that the even more complex (than Ada) C++ was what eventually became popular.
Ada history: https://www.adahome.com/History/
FYI, I worked on a self-hosted Ada compiler as a grad student intern at Rolm (the Mil-Spec computer side, not the digital PBX side) in the summer of 1984.
It also seems to have more powerful ways to set the exact machine representation of types than C.
We booted the ada disk first thing in the morning, changed some writeln() statements, and kicked off the build.
After lunch, the executable was ready (this was not "hello world", but a system with maybe 50K SLOC.
Not practical on that date, with machines that existed. As for writing code that worked, and eliminating defects by language design, ada has no peer. Even in 2021.
Today compile time is not a problem.
That aside, work got done. You spent a little more time checking your code for errors instead of letting the compiler do it.