I'm not sure what you mean by "coincidence" or "accident" here.
C is a pretty OK language for writing an OS in the 70s. UNIX got popular for reasons I think largely orthogonal to being written in C. UNIX was one of the first operating systems that was widely licensed to universities. Students were obliged to learn C to work with it.
If the Macintosh OS had come out first and taken over the world, we'd probably all be programming in Object Pascal.
When everyone wanted to program for the web, we all learned JavaScript regardless of its merits or lack thereof.
I don't think there's much very interesting about C beyond the fact that it rode a platform's coattails to popularity. If there is something interesting about it that I'm missing, I'd definitely like to know.
C is a pretty OK language for writing an OS in the 70s. UNIX got popular for reasons I think largely orthogonal to being written in C. UNIX was one of the first operating systems that was widely licensed to universities. Students were obliged to learn C to work with it.
If the Macintosh OS had come out first and taken over the world, we'd probably all be programming in Object Pascal.
When everyone wanted to program for the web, we all learned JavaScript regardless of its merits or lack thereof.
I don't think there's much very interesting about C beyond the fact that it rode a platform's coattails to popularity. If there is something interesting about it that I'm missing, I'd definitely like to know.