Comment by coldpie

C is great and I definitely recommend learning it & becoming proficient in it. I don't think I would recommend it for a new project, for all the reasons jerf mentions in a sibling comment[1]. But there's a ton of existing code out there, and I think it provides a nice little peek into what the hardware is actually doing that you don't get from higher level languages.

> I think the work on C23 means people are starting to want to see innovation in the language again.

I have to admit this makes me nervous. Part of what's nice about C is its simplicity and its stability. It's relatively easy to write a compiler, and the lack of having many different ways to do the same thing means all code written in C tends to "feel" roughly the same (outside some domain-specific areas), which means it's easy to dive into a new codebase and get up to speed. It's basically all structs & functions and abstractions built upon them. That's it.

While I definitely am not opposed to making improvements to the C spec, seeing the inline anonymous functions in a proposal linked elsewhere in this thread[2] really turns me off. It starts to feel like the hideous mess that C++ has turned into, with oodles of implicit behavior, un-greppable code, generated symbol names leading to compiler error hell, and a thousand different colors for your bike shed.

We already have languages that can do all this stuff. I welcome making changes to C to make it nicer to program in C, but I'm wary of proposals that turn C into yet another messy kitchen sink programming language. Let's keep it clean, obvious, and simple, please.

[1] https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n3266.htm#u...