alt Hacker NewsFair enough. I think it qualifies as "essential complexity" and in my limited experience it's not a common use case and so doesn't make sense to optimize for.
In fact in my academic and professional career most of the highly "functional" C that I've come across has been written by me, when I'd rather amuse myself than make something readable.
It (this particular example, of function pointer syntax) is absolutely just incidental complexity, though. E.G. Haskell
(a -> b) -> c -> d
becomes C
D (*f(B (*)(A)))(C)
and it's no surprise that the former is considered much less fancy than the latter.
Of course it's not common — because the language makes it painful :) The causation is the other way around. We've seen in plenty of languages that if first-class functions are ergonomic to use then people use them all over the place.