I agree with everything you just said here.

One of the motivations behind new dialects and languages, which I think is very harmful, is the idea that we can and should, engineer the necessity to know and understand what we are doing when we program in a given language. I'm not talking about semantic leverage, higher level languages with more abstract functions on more abstract data, there are real benefits there, we will all probably agree to that.

I'm talking more about where the intent is to invest languages with more "safety", "good practices", to bake certain preferences into language features, so that writers no longer recognize these as engineering choices, and the language as a means of expression of any choice we might make, but that the language has built-in "the right way" to do things, and if the program compiles and runs at all, then it must be safe and working in certain respects.

No matter what language, craft and knowledge are not optional. The language that we choose for a problem domain wants to give us freedom to express our choices, while taking care of the things that wold otherwise weigh us down. Some people would say that's exactly what the new dialects bring us, but I see too much artificial orthodoxy invented last week, and too many declarations of the "one true way", in many of the most recent languages, for my taste.

On 03/13/2023 12:00 PM, Clem Cole wrote:


On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 12:00 PM Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com> wrote:
... The committee's goal is to standardize existing practice of the language
in a way that is implementable on the widest range of hardware and OS
platforms, and to provide a controlled way to add language extensions.
Ah, the problem, of course, is right there. 

Too many people try to "fix" programming languages, particularly academics and folks working on a new PhD. Other folks (Gnu is the best example IMO) want to change things so the compiler writers (and it seems like the Linux kernel developers) can do something "better" or "more easily."  As someone (I think Dan Cross) said, when that happens, it's no longer C. Without Dennis here to say "whoa," - the committee is a tad open loop.   Today's language is hardly the language I learned before the "White Book" existed in the early/mid 1970s.  It's actually quite sad.   I'm not so sure we are "better" off.

Frankly, I'd probably rather see ISO drop a bunch of the stuff they are now requiring and fall back at least to K&R2 -- keep it simple. The truth is that we still use the language today is that K&R2 C was then (and still is) good enough and got (gets) the job done extremely well.    Overall, I'm not sure all the new "features" have added all that much.
ᐧ