This piece by Aria Beingessner is incredibly relevant to our shipping-this-week episode with Brian Kernighen:

My problem is that C was elevated to a role of prestige and power, its reign so absolute and eternal that it has completely distorted the way we speak to each other. Rust and Swift cannot simply speak their native and comfortable tongues – they must instead wrap themselves in a grotesque simulacra of C’s skin and make their flesh undulate in the same ways it does.

C is the lingua franca of programming. We must all speak C, and therefore C is not just a programming language anymore – it’s a protocol that every general-purpose programming language needs to speak.

And just in case these pull quotes leave you with the impression that Aria is happy about the situation… yeah, nope.