But I don't. I think people should have a free choice to select their favourite languages when doing hobby programming. When doing commercial jobs, you normally don't have a choice - the customer (or the company you work for) normally have requirements about what language to use.

I just note that the comment "cryptic" about C seems to only come from people who have not spent extensive time writing programs in C or C++ (or PHP). If we note the huge amount of operating systems and other important applications that has been developed in C or C++, it should be quite obvious that the two langauages can not be as bad as some people manages to decide based on a quick peek.

You don't decide to use C for an operating system because your main goal is to make it hard for beginners to be able to read the source...

I can't read russian. As a matter of fact, it takes me quite some time just to dechipher the cyrillic characters. But that does not seem to affect a native russian.

I can read english well, even if it is a secondary language.

The main thing is that most things are more or less hard, but becomes easier with experience.

C is definitely not a beginners language. But it is important that beginners do not take a quick peek at C or C++ (and a couple of weeks of programming in C is a quick peek) and quickly judge the value of the language based on that.

Some tools are harder to learn, but they may give back a lot when properly learned.

It is a known fact that the more languages you know, the easier it is to learn yet one more. That goes both for natural languages and for programming languages.

So, when people already do know Pascal well (preferably an object-pascal dialect), it may be easier to take a look at C or C++. But such a peek must be openminded, without the preconception that C is cryptic. Anything that is assumed to be hard to learn, will be hard to learn. C may use different symbols, but once known by our brain, the look of a symbol does not matter much to how well we can read the information.