C was created for solving a very practical and specific problem: making the newly born UNIX operating system easily portable across different architectures. It was an impressive success on that challenge.

That means most of the decisions Dennis Ritchie (with the help of others) took when designing the language were the right ones for solving the problem at hand [1], otherwise the language wouldn't have survived as strongly as it did. [2]

[1] http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/chist.pdf

[2] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....