> you simply have failed as a programming language designer

That's some hubris. The C language is 49 years old. Dennis Ritchie made reasonable design decisions for the time he found himself in. I think we should be understanding of that, and the network effects that lead to large parts of the world's critical software infrastructure being implemented in C. I don't think he failed at anything.

I used to be a C developer. I know how easy it is shoot your foot off in C. I think that, arguably, as an industry we should think twice before building more big and/or critical systems in C. There are better tools now.

But we are where we are and it's important to understand how we got here. Castigating our predecessors as failures does them a disservice.