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White House urges developers to dump C and C++
(www.infoworld.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It wasn't bad at the time relative to what else was around.
And I don't even know what you're getting at by saying "all" successor languages copied it. Are you referring to how many languages use curly braces as block delimiters? Because that's not what's wrong with C.