>Yes there were alternatives.

Yes, mostly proprietary this party systems which abtracted complexities away from programmers placing their trust to that often not even sure your language vendor was not belly up or with good luck purchased by someone else who then told you we do not support it any more next year. And left you to deal with that. Not fun, not even close I may add. I know who weren't so lucky and had to gather pieces at least mostly rewriting things again new toolkit.

Software development invests in that written code and you learn to appreciate that when you got a lot of it understanding how large and costly task it would be to rewrite another language. Especially then it was that. Now LLM's, much better IDE's etc help a lot with that. Today standards thinking you do not make fair comparison what it was back then.

>...have you ever tried to write portable C code in K&R C without it being full of #ifdefs?

Yes I have done it, not just tried. It wasn't too bad after all when you knew how to do it. Most of systems dependent were hidden away by ourselves to .h files and some to libraries we did. That time it was common thing to teach even, and if not learn from others code how to do it.

That way we knew we had better chance easier to port it something even remotely close existing kind of platforms and OS's. Investment in written software as too great to ignore.

But, did you lately or when did last time write software without relying those abstractions being hidden away either device vendor libraries or third parties modules?

While you think of it, let me tell you that this situation where we are now is so much much less diversity with our target systems and plenty of programming languages with multitude of good libraries and ready made modules do not compare at all to what situation was end of 80's. Comparing software development effort today's languages and tools by then doesn't make sense at all. Everything was so much slower and time consuming.

That area where C-language is still relevant is now much narrower, but there still are niches where I understand it fairly well. I also understand that you don't get it but that is not a my problem, it's more of a you problem if that irritates you from my point of viewing this matter.

But whatever written here for before above, I see no value continuing this argument with you any more. If you haven't this far understood what I tried conveying there is no hope with me you will eventually get what I try to explain.

So by that I'm wishing you a nice day, cheers.