For some reason I find this sentence rather amusing: "Starting point: C, fix some obvious flaws, remove crud, add a few missing features." From what I've seen

For some reason I find this sentence rather amusing: "Starting point: C, fix some obvious flaws, remove crud, add a few missing features." From what I've seen, they've done some good things with this language, and looking backwards from today, it's clear that C is one of its ancestors. Yet if I was given a blank sheet of paper with the same sentence, I would end up with a completely different language. In other words, this reads to me like shorthand for "Rob, that thing that's in your head, build that" (which is a perfectly legit thing to say -- I've said it myself). It's like giving a bunch of people the requirement to fix the "obvious flaws" of automobiles, and someone draws a convertible, and someone draws an electric car, and someone draws a motorcycle, and still someone else draws a bus. Looking backward, you can see where it came from, but looking forward, nobody can predict where fixing someone else's obvious flaws might lead. I kind of want to hold a contest where I take some ordinary thing that everybody uses but nobody loves, and have a bunch of people all design a new one that just fixes the "obvious flaws"!