In 1979, the industry needed ‘C with Classes’. It did not need whatever is required today. Hence the only viable path is the one we’re on. Counter point - who is using Pony (the programming language) today? No one.
Now, I’m teaching undergraduate courses of my own and, while I do not have the flexibility to change the languages used in my current offerings, if I ever start teaching a systems programming course I will absolutely require the students to use Pony.
I’m not sure if Pony is still being used, but the language was making some headway, at least on the PLT side of things. I know the inclusion of some of their reference capabilities work (and practical implementation of prior research in the area) would be a benefit to greenfield programming language design. I think they missed going the process calculus route, instead choosing actors, but overall I liked the direction.
No one cared about C beyond a few universities.
All because Unix folks tried to create C with classes, or a crappy and bloated pseudo-Smalltalk OOP language to run everywhere (C++ under Unix/Motif, and Java from Sun).
Meanwhile, TCL/Tk was good enough for tons of cases. If Sun supported it instead of Java we could have been using something as portable as Java but with a far lighter VM and requeriments. SQLite3 was granted.
Just look at the shitload of applications created with VB5-6 under Windows. TCL/Tk could've get aficionados from both sides and create something cross-platform and playable. Minecraft with GL/DX bindings automatically compiled from C would weight far less...
RAD applications? tons of them for the office. No need for OLE for MSOffice, it would have proper DB backends. Multimedia? I'm pretty sure SDL and FFMPEG bindings for TCL would born in the spot. Speed? all the improvements for the JDK we were seeing over a decade would have been in TCL and it would be on par on the experiments made for V8 in JS.