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Originally they were targeting "systems programming"

Choose the greatest impediment and cite it as a primary goal.

I am not quite sure if I follow you. Are you saying that "systems programming" is the greatest impediment?

Targeting systems programming is. The existing languages used there are rather firmly entrenched.

And that's a problem. If you want to do system programming, there's C. And that's pretty much it. I don't think this is a very favorable situation.

Why not? It's the language that was used to write the OS, which is why Perl and shells still hold sway here as well.