The question is not whether any particular language you might pick today is better than any other language you might pick in 1959, but whether there is some kind of teleology or "progress" to which languages are aspiring or at least slouching.
GC (and "memory safety" more generally) was not invented to solve the problems of C after C somehow revealed them solving the problems of e.g. Fortran. C variously sidestepped and ignored the work on program analysis including GC and memory safety for various commercial, aesthetic, and incidental reasons. Similar things are the case for C++ (vs. e.g. Object Pascal / Simula), Objective-C and Swift (vs. Smalltalk and Self), JavaScript and PHP (vs. nearly everything).
Lisp from 1959 stacks up incredibly well against Python today. Fortran still autovectorizes better than most modern languages. Pascal remains better to teach structured programming, we just don't teach that much anymore (and you can tell just by grabbing a half dozen loops at random and trying to figure out how well their conditions capture their invariants). Languages don't get better over time. They do get marketing budgets unimaginable before the 90s ("thanks" largely to Sun and Java for kicking this off), and for the past 20 years or so weird personal identity arguments on top of that (probably somehow Perl's fault).
