alt Hacker NewsC is still, by far, the simplest language that we have.
Although many newer languages are safer (with the exclusion of Rust, primarily by being slower) the same kinds of issues that are there in C are there in these languages, their effects are just harder to see.
People complain about C as though they know how to fix it.
Replies
C sits right in the middle between assembly and BASIC in terms of simplicity. You can't do a simple popcnt, but you can implement jump tables.
It's slower than Fortran and, depending on the platform, cobol. It's a bigger minefield than any language that came after it barring C++.
The only real advantage I can ascribe to C is that it's actually still being used after all these years, and it mostly works similarly on most hardware, like a Java for people who enjoy the casino.
Fixing C without breaking existing C code is pretty much impossible. You can start by defining warnings for UB, but then you will break any of the more trivial examples in the article. You can also start by simply killing off weird platforms (force a specific amount of bits for instance, screw the weird 16 bit char chips). Making casts explicit would probably fix a lot of problems too, though you'd need better syntax for that.
There is no fixing C without changing what C really is.
Can you elaborate what do you think C has in terms of simplicity that Zig doesn't, and which "same kinds of issues" do you think it has?
I'm not an expert in either language but my anecdotal experience disagrees with this - writing Zig has been far simpler and less error-prone than writing C.
C is not a simple language in the sense that writing software in C is simple, and I think that's the only useful way to understand the word "simple" in this context.
Brainfuck is "simple" by any other definition as well, but that's not a useful quality.