No, it was a convoluted way to say that the attempt to measure C programs by their quality as "idiomatic" will unlikely bear any fruits of value. That said, if

No, it was a convoluted way to say that the attempt to measure C programs by their quality as "idiomatic" will unlikely bear any fruits of value. That said, if there is any non-idiomatic C code then the attempts of 'experts' in other languages to mangle C to look more like their language surely fall into this category (There are lots of examples where the author starts 'We can make C look more like fortran by defining our macros to replace these keywords..).