Yep,

> Although we entertained occasional thoughts about implementing one of the major languages of the time like Fortran, PL/I, or Algol 68, such a project seemed hopelessly large for our resources: much simpler and smaller tools were called for. All these languages influenced our work, but it was more fun to do things on our own

https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/chist...

And thus systems programming without bounds checking was eventually made mainstream