I fully agree with you. C, a language designed in 1972, has the issues you outlined.

I personally have higher expectations of a language designed in the 2000s by people standing on the shoulders of 40 years of computer science and language research.

Here's a contrived analogy:

Imagine if you bought the newest Tesla truck meant to replace old Ford model trucks and you had to vigorously shake the steering wheel in order to lower the driver's window.

You're saying: "Ford trucks have always used a hand crank and that feels strange too if you're not used to it!"

I'm saying: "Why did they choose to make it equally strange in the first place?"

> Sure seems like C has its own massive issue with "we can't let a name be long"

Ahh yes, I believe that came about due to the great "Vowel Bowl" of the 1970s. There was a serious shortage of vowels.

I realize you're joking, but probably some of it came from limitations of the Era. As recently as early 2000s, I had to use a 68k assembler that had a limit of something like 8 or 10 characters for a label. The really annoying part was you could have longer names, but it would silently ignore any extra. We're still stuck with other decisions that were driven by size constraints (like the separation of /bin and /usr/bin, IIRC).

It comes from the limitations of some early pre-standard C compilers. It was fairly common to use fixed-length arrays, to avoid heap allocations for perf and memory usage reasons. This included identifiers; but then you had to decide on the maximum size - since most identifiers would be fairly short anyway, so a large array would be wasted space.

Since the first edition of ANSI/ISO C was trying to codify the already-existing common practices for maximum portability, it reflects those existing limits (5.2.4.1 "Translation limits"):

"The implementation shall be able to translate and execute at least one program that contains at least one instance of every one of the following limits:

...

31 significant initial characters in an internal identifier or a macro name

6 significant initial characters in an external identifier"

If you look at many abbreviated function names from the C stdlib, they are specifically 6 characters long - strcpy etc. I wouldn't be surprised if the 6-char external identifier limit goes all the way back to the first K&R C compilers.

When you have to manually wrap wires around iron cores for each individual bit of memory you get a visceral desire to keep things short... :P