> C (the language) does not cause people to write unmaintainable or hard to understand code Well then it’s good that OP didn’t claim that C the language causes

> C (the language) does not cause people to write unmaintainable or hard to understand code Well then it’s good that OP didn’t claim that C the language causes people to write such code. They said “The C ethos”, not “The C language.” It’s not about the language’s technical requirements, it’s about what’s idiomatic in a language, how it’s taught, and what style is used by the vast majority of the existing corpus of code written in that language. Look at the C standard library’s function names, vsnfprintf/strdupa/acosh/ftok… Compare it to something like Objective-C at the other extreme, where method and variable names tend to always have fully spelled out identifiers with no abbreviations and a full description of what’s being done (`- [NSString stringByAppendingString]`, etc.) Is it due to some technical requirement? Is stringByAppendingString illegal in C because it’s too long? Is strdup illegal in ObjC because it’s too short? Of course not! But why do we see this everywhere so consistently? Why does C have short indecipherable function names and ObjC have such long ones, if the language doesn’t require it? Because idioms matter. If you’re learning C, you’re learning the way it is typically taught. You’re reading other C code. You’re encouraged to program the way other C programmers program. You’re likely using the standard library a lot. Likewise ObjC. This means two things: - Yes, in a very obvious sense, it’s not the language’s fault, it’s the programmers’s fault. - But also, paradoxically, it is the language’s fault, because a language is not just a set of syntax in a vacuum, it’s also a corpus of existing code, a set of idioms, a community of people, and a way of thinking of things. C absolutely causes people to write hard-to-understand code when viewed through this lens. Your comment has been written in so many ways in so many threads discussing programming languages, it’s absolutely tiring. Yes, you can write terrible code in any language, and you can write great code in any language (well almost any… probably not brainfuck.) Nobody is arguing that. When we discuss whether one language is more readable than the other, we’re always talking about the qualities of typical code you actually see in a language, and about what style of code that language encourages.