"When you make a language operate closely to the metal, you can expect the syntax to be more abstruse" It's the exact opposite. Close-to-the-metal, the syntax

"When you make a language operate closely to the metal, you can expect the syntax to be more abstruse" It's the exact opposite. Close-to-the-metal, the syntax is actually very friendly - you've got values, and you can bash them in like a half-dozen ways. C is incredibly simple (I suppose their pointer syntax is a little janky, but one can always express it "one level at a time" via typedefs). The really complicated parts come from making high-level operations seem "easy". There is no close-to-the-metal notion of char* vs a string, or a lvalue vs an rvalue, let alone template metaprogramming.