Dennis Ritchie loved LISP

I found a pretty neat interview of the 3 creators of C, C++, and Java from the year 2000. http://www.gotw.ca/publications/c_family_interview.htm

When asked if there was a language that was the best for every situation, he replied with a simple 'No, that's silly'. When asked what other languages beside C he likes best, he said he admires languages like LISP. Overall he was very humble and concise.

Why do you dislike Dennis?

>C/C++ is hard to use
Its worse-is-better, every language which is easier or more powerful abstractly, loses very hard on low-level performance vs C, making C a final instance for speed/memory vs ease of use tradeoff, just one step above assembler(which can be inlined into C).
Using plain C for everything will be painful, so either very good C libraries are made/used/imported or the programs are written in higher-level language using some C-library to get extra speed. The rest of the speed/memory curve is filled with language which are either too hard to use or have steep performance costs so they're not used beyond toy programs. C wins either way, since nothing can compete with optimized C compilers for the #1 performance spot it takes and Asm went out of fashion after systems became more complex than a ZX spectrum.