C’s Faults

A few nights ago while lying in bed I put together a list of things that I don’t like about C:

• Side effects
• Weak typing
• Breakable semantics
• Simple types
• Design tends to put many cases into one struct
• No first-class functions
• No overflow/sign checks
• No homoiconicity or metacircular evaluation
• Weak macros
• Numerous code styles and conventions
• No namespaces
• Memory management
• Incorrect arithmetic
• Compiler-driven development
• Implementation-defined behavior
• No inherent or safe concurrency
• Multiple character sets
• Eager evaluation
• Encourages monolithic design
• Separate declarations and definitions
• No cheap container types like lists or tuples built in
• Difficult to reason about
• Debugging is necessary and primitive
• Declaration order matters

I began to think about what I would change to improve it while keeping it attractive to current users. Despite this list, I gained a newfound respect for C’s design. It really is quite elegant for being so low level.