I can't recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
No one wants one language. There are applications when it's appropriate to write something in C rather than in Java. If you want to write something where performance is much more important than extensibility, then you might want to choose C rather than Java.
C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new.
C is peculiar in a lot of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a certain unity of approach that stems from development in a small group.
The kind of programming that C provides will probably remain similar absolutely or slowly decline in usage, but relatively, JavaScript or its variants, or XML, will continue to become more central.
Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.
Invented languages have often been created in tandem with entire invented universes, and most conlangers come to their craft by way of fantasy and science fiction.
A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.
No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.
Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like 'knight.'