This attitude is why we’re all still stuck writing C++ in 2026. Nobody wants to admit that they’re not hardcore enough to write in poorly designed languages so we never make the effort to improve the situation. We all seem to agree that Zig is an upgrade over C. There’s nothing inherently modern about Zig that we couldn’t have written back in 1995 - we just didn’t because nobody wanted to admit that C is frustrating and clunky, albeit fast.
I honestly didn't know people like this still existed, with such strong viewpoints on C.
Point out to these people that compilers rewrite your code quite significantly so the choice of language matters a lot less than the choice of debugger, profiler, etc.
I nowadays use flex, calc, clamp, min, max, scoped variables, and even display table sometimes these days and it just works so well. Eliminates almost all hacks.