> The issue I have with this narcisstic fatigue (similar to the author's point I assume) is that there is no reflection when they fuck up a codebase.
Forgive my bluntness, but do you even know any C programmers? The ones I know are not at all a homogenous group (there isn't even anything resembling a "C community" - and IMHO that's a good thing btw).
> The best code is the code that is safe and easy to read.
These two things are not really related.
- Rust code is safe, but typically not easy to read
- C code is unsafe, but typically easy to read
...as a counter example though, C++ code is unsafe, and typically not easy to read.
Of course "readability" is entirely subjective too. Seasoned programmers are typically blind to the problems of their language of choice (and that includes C's sloppiness, and Rust's readability). Language beginners typically stumble over problems that experienced users of that language wouldn't even think of.
> Code should be dumb and easily maintainable.
Well, obviously, but see above, one programmers 'dumb and maintainable' is another programmers 'unmaintainable complicated mess'. IME it's harder to write code that's 'dumb and maintenable' in languages that nudge the programmers towards sugarcoating the program logic in high level abstractions than in "simple" languages like C, Go or Zig, because you don't just need to know the language, but also understand the high level abstractions the original author came up with (and which might have been a good fit at the start of the project, but not 3 years later when requirements have changed and the original programmers have long left for greener pastures).
IME it's not 'narcissism' that makes programmers pick C, but the incredible flexibility of the language, combined with being quite predictable what code will be generated (yes, optimizer passes do complex things, but after a while you'll develop an intuition for what the compiler will do, verifiable via godbolt).
Also for instance, look at the hoops other languages are willing to jump through just to get close - but never fully match - what's possible with simple text replacement in the C preprocessor (an incredible hot take, I know).