C hasn’t changed all that much, and someone who coded in C99 would take about 30mins to catch up to a modern C23 codebase’s changes. Famously so, as conservatism to change is the main friction in the community for about two decades now.

If you pull out examples of the earliest C, sure, it looks weird. But that C was already obsolete in 1989. Since then, it’s had a minor iteration (e.g. five-eight additions/modifications) every decade-ish (99, 11, 17, 23). Has it changed? Sure. Can it be compared to the iteration and speed of things like C#, Java, C++, etc? No way.

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pjmlp an hour ago | parent [-]

I am quite sure many people would fail Pub Quizzes related to C, when taking into account the whole language alongside compiler extensions, regardless of the compiler.

	▲	deaddodo 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		To learn all of the common GCC and MSVC extensions would make up a fraction of the language features of C# or Java. You’re really overstating the complexity to make some invalid point. “Actually, one of the most notoriously conservative and simple (in feature set) languages is really super complex and has evolved a ton because it has _Generic and varargs now, and __packed__ exists as a compiler feature.” And to further double down, that minor evolution is over 36 years (arguably a decade longer, but I’m being generous with your argument). Not the 12-16 years (depending which 5 point release you wanna start with) that PHP has morphed into an entirely different language.