I don't think Pauan was referring to C syntax as a whole. In this subthread, I think we've been specifically talking about whether certain languages have a "single, canonical" indentation style that "falls out naturally."
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"There may be a fundamental law that the more underpowered the language, the easier it is to read. Sort of like how Dr. Seuss books are more readable than research papers on programming languages theory, right?"
In one sense that's true, since it's easy to make naive improvements to one feature while neglecting another. In another sense, a less readable language is always relatively "underpowered" due to its greater difficulty to use (assuming it's a language we use by reading :-p ).
I think C is a great language. It maps straightforwardly onto to the capabilities of the hardware. What I meant by calling it underpowered is that it doesn't do much to increase your power beyond freeing you from having to write assembly language.
Higher order functions and metaprogramming are the sort of things I associate with a powerful language, like Lisp. But sometimes things get so abstract you can't tell what you're looking at.
As you point out, it's easy to ruin something like a programming language while trying to improve it. (I haven't created a programming language, but I've used bad ones.)
