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C's text preprocessor headers were a pragmatic design choice in the 1970s. It's just that the language stuck around longer than it deserved to.

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So what language is ready to take its place in the thousands of new chips that emerge every year, the new operating systems, and millions of programs written in see every year?

You're alluding to the network effects that make that takeover difficult now, after decades of doubling down on a technically weak and systemically insecure solution.

Languages that are technically capable of replacing C in all those applications include Ada, (and in certain applications, SPARK Ada), D, Zig, Rust, and the Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon family. None of those language use a purely textual preprocessor like C's. They all fix many of C's other design weaknesses that were excusable in the 1970s, but really aren't today.

But Rust in the Linux kernel is no longer experimental, so perhaps things are starting to improve.

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