C may be simple, but its too simple to be called elegant. The lack of namespacing comes to mind. Or that it is a staticly typed language, whose type system is b

C may be simple, but its too simple to be called elegant. The lack of namespacing comes to mind. Or that it is a staticly typed language, whose type system is barely enforced (you have to declare all types, but sometimes it feels like everything decays to int and *void without the right compiler incantations). Or the build system, where you have to learn a separate language to generate a separate language to compile the program (which a both also not really simple and elegant in my eyes). Or null-terminated strings: to save some 7 bytes per string (on modern platforms) C uses one of the most dangerous and unelegant constructs in the popular part of the programming-world. Or the absolutely inelegant error handling, where you either return an in-band-error-value, set a global variable or both or just silently fail. Or the standard-library, that is littered with dangerous functions. Or the reliance of the language definition on undefined behaviour, that forces you to read a 700-page, expensive document back to back to know whether a vital check in your program might be ignored by compilers or when your program might shred your hard drive, despite you never instructing it to do so. Or... C has a simple syntax, but it is most certainly not elegant.