The stagnation happened because AT&T shills wanted it to be that way. They created the "UNIX is right and everyone else is wrong" mantra, which goes along with the mentality that you should never fix anything because all mistakes are user error. If you're coming from VMS and you say the UNIX way is broken and sucks, the shills trained the weenies to say that VMS is the problem and UNIX is always right. A language where 4[a-1] means a[4-1] is obviously broken beyond repair, but weenies still defend that bullshit.
What's more shocking is that some languages were already better than C before C existed than C is in 2018.
More like 50 years, although if that quote was from 1980 or earlier it was probably true at the time.
Lisp machines are not the only thing besides UNIX and other C-based operating systems. Instructions for segmented memory and strings would be useful to most programmers. If the file system worked the way flat memory model does, it would suck. The main Multics idea was to make memory work more like files so all memory is in the file system and made of segments that can change their size like files do. This is still a good idea even though the MMUs of most processors don't support it.
It might use an extra 1% of silicon to benefit 90% of developers, but I don't know the exact numbers. RISC fanatics used to say FPUs were bloat and you should do floating point in software, but the facts showed that they were wrong and now they have FPUs too.
This poor user tried to use Unix's poor excuse forDEFSYSTEM. He is immediately sucked into the Unix "group ofuncooperative tools" philosophy, with a dash of the usualunix braindead mailer lossage for old times' sake. Of course, used to the usual unix weenie response of"no, the tool's not broken, it was user error" the poor usersadly (and incorrectly) concluded that it was human error,not unix braindamage, which led to his travails.
Continuing in the Unix mail tradition of adding tangential remarks,Likewise, I've always thought that if Lisp were a ball of mud, and APL a diamond, that C++ was a roll of razor wire.That comparison of Lisp and APL is due to Alan Perlis - heactually described APL as a crystal. (For those who haven'tseen the reasoning, it was Alan's comment on why everyoneseemed to be able to add to Lisp, while APL seemedremarkably stable: Adding to a crystal is very hard, becauseyou have to be consistent with all its symmetry andstructure. In general, if you add to a crystal, you get amess. On the other hand, if you add more mud to a ball ofmud, it's STILL a ball of mud.)To me, C is like a ball. Looked at from afar, it's nice andsmooth. If you come closer, though, you'll see littlecracks and crazes all through it.C++, on the other hand, is the C ball pumped full of toomuch (hot) air. The diameter has doubled, tripled, andmore. All those little cracks and crazes have now growninto gaping canyons. You wonder why the thing hasn't justexploded and blown away.BTW, Alan Perlis was at various times heard to say that(C|Unix) had set back the state of computer science by(10|15) years.