Future programming historians may indeed look back on Ken Thompson as the Thomas Midgley of the software world, having plagued us more than once with costly and dangerous mistakes: null pointers, C, and the abhorrent POSIX API.
> In 1923, Midgley took a long vacation in Miami, Florida, to cure himself of lead poisoning. He "[found] that my lungs have been affected and that it is necessary to drop all work and get a large supply of fresh air".[9]
Null terminated strings.
In, "Trusting Trust" Ken tacitly admitted that C itself was the inside job. Once you align yourself with Cs core tenets, performance above all else, the game itself is up and your mind has been infected against looking at things holistically.
