>you can’t beat the C language for intrinsic simplicity.

I like begriffs for his Haskell work, but I disagree with him on C. Simplicity is a good reason to prefer Wirth languages. They are similarly low-level, but beat C on safety and don't have C's abundance of undefined behavior. I suggest Free Pascal. It is similarly easy to write, compiles faster, helps you catch more bugs early and even has genetics. As I see it, there are only two major downsides to using Free Pascal: the syntax is more verbose and you have to generate and store bindings for C headers.