Oh say can you C?

Programmers have two favorite past-times: arguing about languages and inventing new languages. (Arguing about editors is probably a close third.) When we're not doing one, we're probably doing the other.

I've written about the demise of C++. Yet its predecessor, C, is doing well. So well that people have re-invented C to look more like modern object-oriented languages. Two new languages are "Brace" and "OOC". Brace recasts C syntax to match that of Python, removing braces and using indentation for blocking. OOC is an object-oriented language that is compiled to C.

Improvements to the C language are not new. Objective C was developed in the early 1980s, and C++ itself is a "better" version of C. The early implementations of C++ were source-to-source compiled with a program called 'cfront'.

Improvements of this nature happen a lot. Borland improved Pascal, first extending standard Pascal with useful I/O functions and later morphing it into the Delphi product. Microsoft made numerous changes to BASIC, adding features, converting to Visual Basic, and continuing to add (and often change) features. Even FORTRAN was remade into RATFOR, a name derived from 'rational Fortran'. ('Rational Fortran' meant 'looks like C'.)

I'm not sure that Brace will have much in the way of success. Recasting C into Python gets you ... well, something very close to Python. Why exert the effort? If you wanted Python, you should have started with it. Brace does include support for coroutines, something that may appeal to a very narrow audience, and has support for graphics which may appeal to a broader group. But I don't see a compelling reason to move to it. OOC is in a similar situation. My initial take is that OOC is Ruby but with static typing. And if you wanted Ruby... well, you know the rest.

Improvements to C are nice, but I think the improvers miss an important point: C is small enough to fit inside our heads. The C language is simple and can be understood with four concepts: variables, structs, functions, and pointers. Everything in C is built from these four elements, and can be understood in these terms. You can look at C code and compile it with your "cortex compiler". (I'm ignoring atrocities committed by the preprocessor.) The improved versions of C are more complex and understanding a code fragment requires broader knowledge of the program. Every feature of C++ hid something of the code, and made the person reading the code go off and look at other sections.

The most important aspect of a programming language is readability. Programmers read code more often than you think, and they need to understand. C had this quality. Its derivatives do not. Therefore, there is a cost to using the derivatives. There are also benefits, such as better program organization with object-oriented techniques. The transition from C to C++, or Objective C, or Brace, or OOC is a set of trade-offs, and should be made with care.