@allison @animeirl @idiot @nishi That's all reasonable except:

> (a) the code is easier to reason about in the first damn place and

C is easy to reason about: you can basically do the compilation with pencil and paper. There are a handful of warts around things like casting or bitfields, but it's easier to reason about the behavior of something simple than something complex. Languages that surprise you are the ones that are hard to reason about.

> (b) they don't skimp on tooling.

I think there are two approaches to this, I mean, there are languages that are all tooling (Java has a lot of tooling because it's verbose and it's missing a lot of facilities that you expect from a language that lives on a VM), and there are languages that tooling would only get in the way of. The former effectively mean that your interface to the language includes the tools, but in the latter the interface to the language is just the language. It's usually better to make the tooling unnecessary than to add the tooling, some languages manage to be both concise and expressive, or integrated well enough with the environment that generic tools work for diagnostics. You don't really need a source-level debugger for awk, your awk programs don't get long enough for that to be helpful: the problem doesn't exist so no tool needs to be made to solve it. Most application programming languages can't segfault (or at least not because of a bug in your code): the bug has been avoided so you don't need a tool to handle it. Or they've integrated a stack trace, you don't need a separate tool for that.

Like, Nethack. Reading Nethack's source code is a component of playing Nethack. It is a little unique in that sense, most games don't work that way. You push the button, Mario jumps, your interface to a Mario game is all in the controller. Maybe for some games the interface is the controller plus a guide. Not that Java is terrible because of that, just that the interface to Java isn't Java source code files, it's Java source code files and the IDE and whatnot, and XCode seems to work more or less the same way.

As kind of a personal preference or a matter of taste, I like the languages that are usable without the tooling.