> It's all very academic and I don't have a strong opinion on it either way but I would say C has a relatively simple syntax (no classes, no inheritance, few keywords, few symbols in its syntax etc.) but its semantics (i.e. how to use the simple syntax to produce correct software) are fairly complex.

I agree that C's syntax is visually simple, but it's actually pretty complex from a parsing perspective: it's both context sensitive and binding sensitive, meaning that a correct C parser needs to be aware of the current parsing context's "live" bindings (including other functions) in order to resolve ambiguities like this:

    int foo(int(bar));

(`foo` could either be a function or a local `int` variable.)

I can understand that ultimate mindset! Rust is certainly a much more complex language from a syntax and semantics perspective, and (I think) the community wouldn't want to claim the "C successor" label anyways.