[com2kid]

I'm presuming the poster either never took a compilers course, never had to write a parser, slept through their entire CS curriculum, or doesn't have a background in CS. (Which to be clear, doesn't have to involve a degree! The people who invented Computer Science sure as heck didn't have CS degrees!)

People forget that Computer Scientists has actual foundations built upon objective, scientifically backed, work in multiple disciplines, including mathematics, linguistics, and philosophy.

We use those foundations to build the tools that we then use to engineer software. It is one of the few fields where practitioners are expected to know both the foundational theories underpinning the tools they build, as well as then use those tools to create absurdly complex projects.

Sadly some people skip over the theory part.

[Dylan16807]

I don't think a lot of theory went into most of C's syntax. History is important but it doesn't make designs good.

And if we really want to get into how much C was copied, that's more because of familiarity than correctness. Look how many languages copied C's goofy precedence for bitwise operations, which was only there because they made a syntax change and didn't want to disrupt a few existing programs.

But all this aside, you didn't answer the question at all. What was their unbelievable claim?

[com2kid]

> I don't think a lot of theory went into most of C's syntax. History is important but it doesn't make designs good.

Agreed. C is just what sort of worked at the time. 50 years on, we can do better. Theory is what lets us do so in a scientific way, instead of just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what works.

Although, there is something to be said for testing out new syntax and seeing how it feels in the real world!