I have a hard time understanding the supposed elegance of C. I know it pretty well and use it all the time, but only because it's what the platform demands.<p>On the one hand, C has a tiny runtime that can be omitted or replaced. On the other, it doesn't have all sorts of things that would be helpful but not require runtime overhead.<p>My biggest complaint is lack of a module system. #include is a stupid ugly hack. Second would be the way it doesn't let you portably define and work with low-level data representations in a standard way. I don't count manual bit masking and shifting for this.<p>I would also really prefer a more advanced type system, including parametric polymorphism integrated with the module system, but not via templates.