Anything is less familiar when you come from a certain background.

Study after study has shown that in coding we tend to fall back to conflate simple with familiar.

I don't like this explicitness, because very often it's a lie. In the times of PDP-11 that would compile into a literal counter and literal MOV and ADD instructions. Now it will most often compile into some vectorized semi-unrolled form with seven-letter instructions that add 4 integers at once, etc.

If I want specific instructions to be run in a specific order, like touching hardware registers, I reach for intrinsics or assembly. If I want an array summed, I prefer to express the intent: total = the_array.sum(); I leave the implementation to the compiler / stdlib.

I feel like every time someone tries to tell me how good C is they immediately end up reminding me of https://queue.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3212477.3212479

I honestly don't think total = a.sum() is any less explicit than for (size_t i = 0; i <= n; i++) total += a[i]. If anything, a.sum() is more explicit as at least it expresses the programmer's intention explicitly. The loop is one more layer between the reader and the writer's intention, nor correctly reflecting how it works on the bare metal. So it's the worse of both worlds.

A toy example is meant to demonstrate a principle. Toy examples often have alternative ways they can be written, but the concept they are meant to demonstrate requires the whole machinery being employed. Furthermore, how do you think .sum is implemented?

[delayed]

Bad ergonomics in loops is questionable design, but that loop in particular isn't better than total = reduce(a, +, 0).

> that loop in particular isn't better than total = reduce(a, +, 0).

it is, in fact, better

You have a point - I find Rust syntax horrible.

C is in some ways minimal, but the pointer-syntax and some more I absolutely dislike. I also found C++ easier to use in some areas, such as:

   cout << "Hey there" << endl;

The equivalent C is simply uglier. Of course C++ failed in other areas big time, but for such simple things like above, I think C++ is better than C. Naturally that cout example is very simplistic, but one can find other examples where C is really quite ugly.

It's not very readable. The logic is forced to always use often useless counters and check them, even on the syntax level. I will take any for each mechanism over the loop style. Map, reduce, fold, all better than having to write counters and the check for it.