The case against a C alternative (2022)
c3.handmade.network
c3.handmade.network
> 4. No experienced developers
Well, with C you need experienced devs that are also EXPERIENCED IN C. You can write C that compiles but is all kinds of incorrect, usually subtly. Any new language that works with the dev on writing correct code or outright refuses to compile with incorrect code (hinting at Rust here) cracks this egg a bit.
> If you want to target some obscure platform, then likely it's assuming you're using C.
Some (most?) obscure platforms offer a fork of GCC, yes. With LLVM frontend becomes less and less relevant. This particular chicken and an egg is being broken with or without a successor to C.
> Any C alternative will be expected to be on par with C in performance. The problem is that C have practically no checks, so any safety checks put into the competing language will have a runtime cost, which often is unacceptable. This leads to a strategy of only having checks in "safe" mode. Where the "fast" mode is just as "unsafe" as C.
This argument is circular. There are indeed some scenarios where you do absolutely need "macro system for assembly" to do some weird shit, but typically that is a relatively small part of the whole project. Unsafe modes help tackle this small need. The argument reads like needing C-ish language for some little parts of your project requires to use C-ish language for the whole project.
> 3. Programmer productivity
This whole argument is weirdly focused. In my experience, a huge chunk of effort is spent on rework. Any language that improves turnaround rate improves productivity on feature level. The argument again assumes that devs manage to produce correct code without turnarounds (which is rare in practice even with highly experienced devs) and therefore any new language would increase turnarounds. Safety and productivity features are usually designed to increase quality without expertise-floor.
The problem still is which language will replace C here.
C++ won't.
Neither will Rust or Java.
So which language will replace C here?
I agree that C and Fortran can not be compared really. C will remain for a very long time to come.
I've started writing Rust in the past year and... honestly... I LOVE it.
But what kept me away from Rust for a long time is this talking point of rejecting incorrect code which is so obviously wrong it made proponents of Rust sound very cultish to me.
Rust cannot prevent incorrect code, nor is this possible (halting problem).
What Rust can do is enforce a very specific type of correctness, which may be termed resource-use-correctness. Basically it can enforce that every resource that is used, is properly opened, is properly accessed, has (one writer) OR (multiple readers and no writer) at a time, and is properly closed. It can do this for memory, files, sockets, as well as arbitrary constructs of your choice.
This ability is extremely valuable!
But it is also quite easy to write incorrect buggy programs in Rust, for the very simple reason that it is very easy to write incorrect buggy programs that do not misuse their resources.
In discussions regarding testing and static vs dynamic languages, I like to emphasize the point that with static languages you get some "tests" for free: the compiler enforcing the contract will "test" that you are not passing in string for integer. With e.g. Python if you want to be defensive and on the correctness side, you need to implement poor-man's type restrictions and tests for the unit so it behaves sensibly with call-site being incorrect.
Does it sound cultish to you to insist on static type checks when e.g. writing Python? There's quite tangible value in that.
> Rust cannot prevent incorrect code, nor is this possible (halting problem).
Yes, nothing will prevent analyst/PO from misunderstanding business requirements, nothing will prevent dev from misunderstanding the technical requirements. Or not thinking things through. Errors on this front will always turnaround.
Correctness in this context refers to programmer's and compiler's understanding of code being aligned. Correct code does what it is supposed to do. Rust takes type safety and elevates it to a next level, ensuring reads, writes and object lifetimes are correct.
Rust's contribution is static resource-use-correctness. Of course, it also implements the other features very well. But if you do not talk about these things in precise terms, it will be harder to convince people to embrace Rust adoption.
Thankfully, Rust is not doing bad for itself in terms of adoption, so what do I know! :)
But it is what kept me from using it for a long time.
Unfortunately, even having tools that eliminate simple errors (like spell checkers and grammar checkers in ordinary writing) does not remove reasoning errors or clarity/conciseness issues.
(Efficient resource use is another dimension besides correctness and maintainability. Using an O(NlogN) method versus O(N×N) may be a mistake when N is small, but tools may lack the domain or profiling knowledge to detect such a mistake. Programming languages also seem to generally lack a way to express the importance of tail resource use, so even with profile information a tool might optimize for mean resource use.)
I think more recent languages have also attempted to increase clarity and conciseness by abstraction and consistent syntax. A newer language may also have more idiom consistency (some of the natural idiom divergence may be less more recently with easier communication -- the Internet functioning like cheap books did for spelling?).
I am not a programmer, but I do like thinking about such things.
Unfortunately, this is not true.
https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-rust-match-made-in-hell
https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1v54et2/what_are_the_...
https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1v54et2/what_are_the_...
Mojo arguably does this better, by having both implicit and explicit destructors, and forcing developers to call explicit destructors, well, explicitly. A lock's destructor must be called manually if it is marked explicit, and thus developers reading Mojo code will presumably not be in doubt about where and when the lock is released.
https://mojolang.org/docs/manual/lifecycle/death/#explicitly...
This is different from Rust. In the following Rust edition 2024 code, the only difference between the two examples is a pair of "{}" around the match subject, but if you run them, one of them deadlocks, due to how temporary lifetime extension is handled in Rust.
https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...
https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...
Temporary lifetime extension is a mess in Rust, C++ and Zig. It is not a mess in C, more or less, since compound literals are arguably the only feature of C that have something like temporary lifetime extension, so any problems with temporary lifetime extension in C are limited to compound literals.
Until I learned it for real and forced myself to overcome the hurdles. Now I love it and find it hard to go back to C++. Why would I want to use any language that doesn’t prioritise safety!? Yes Rust can be complex, because things that are safe sometimes can’t be proven to be safe, and then you need a mindset shift to structure the code in ways where it can be proven safe (or if you absolutely need, unsafe lets you isolate the bits that you have to prove yourself. Many people think what’s the point of rust if it has unsafe, but they fail to understand that 100% of your code in other languages is in a rust unsafe block, while in rust at least only the smallest surface needed has to be).
Anyway, yeah, I’m a convert. As for your last paragraph, it’s true, memory safety (and concurrency safety etc) does not mean bug free. But it does eliminate one kind of common high impact error.
Is there a modern language with ABI stability that can replace C for that? As in, you can wrap anything with a C API and be sure that it can be called from any other language easily?
Two C implementations on the same CPU with 64-bit integers both, unsurprisingly, think 64-bit integers work the same way - because that was obvious. Now, how about 128-bit integers. Ah, turns out implementation A thought they go (lo,hi) but B thought they're obviously (hi,lo) so these types have different ABI between C implementations...
It's not obvious because most software which cares about Windows also needs the Windows API and so couldn't be non-Windows software, but Windows people have a different rule for how 64-bit works than everybody else, LLP64 versus the usual LP64. And there were other options such as ILP64 they're just all basically dead.
Also ABI compatibility isn’t part of the C specification. Most implementers use System V ABI compatibility guidelines. Many compilers can output code for different ABI’s calling conventions. There’s more than one! Which you use depends on how crufty the code is and on the platform you are using.
I think the big advantage of C like languages here is the plethora of implementation defined platforms. That’s a huge network effect. If you want to target the 6502? There’s a compiler for it. Some chip you’ve never heard of? Probably some fork of GCC that targets it. Want to call some library function in some foreign binary written in a completely unknown language? If you can finagle the bytes and reverse engineer the calling conventions you can do it with C.
I think it might be that C does leave so much out of the specification and up to the implementation and platform that makes it unique and useful at times.
But obviously nothing will replace C in the sense that C will cease to exist.
I don't consider C++ an alternative to C.
I see it as "a more modern language", but there are "even more modern" languages nowadays. The only reason I see to pick C++ instead of something like Rust would be if there are very mature C++ libraries and it is not practical to call them from the newer language. Typically for computer vision (or maybe just linear algebra?), I would still go with C++, probably? But in terms of language, I would pick any modern language over C++ if they do the job.
What about C, then? I use C when I want interoperability. Nothing currently beats C in that domain, as far as I know. I often wrap whatever I have into a C interface just for that.
IMHO, the interesting question about "replacing C" is really this: if you had to design a modern language meant to compete with C's interop story, how would it look like? Not sure if such a language could have memory-safety, for instance? Could such a language be meaningfully nicer than C?
Disclaimer: I don't know Zig.
Long-term it almost certainly will. But not in our lifetimes, sure.
He acknowledges C++ in the first paragraph ...
He's obviously writing this from the point of view of making a case against what he is doing, which is creating a new language (C3). Interesting perspective considering that this was written just before the LLM hype kicked off. It would be interesting to get an update in that context: why create a new language when AIs are going to be the primary user and what would be killer features for AI coding tools to use? It seems languages like Go and Rust are relatively popular targets for using with such tools. C/C++, not so much (other than for code rewrites in Rust).
The key point is, C++ added numerous features to C, and at the time, it was the only language occupying that position (or perhaps Objective-C, too?).
Today, a successor to C cannot simply replicate what C++ did. Add too many features, and it will be viewed as a successor to C++ rather than to C (as is the case with Rust and D). Conversely, keep the additions minimal in order to stay close to C, and you end up in a "red ocean" crowded with Zig, Odin, C3, Hare, Jai, and others.
> The problem is that C have practically no checks, so any safety checks put into the competing language will have a runtime cost, which often is unacceptable.
Why would all possible checks that provide an improvement over C be runtime-only?
(Edit: No disrespect meant. I just thought such completely different language concepts potentially sharing the same name was kind of amusing)
Rust was made to replace C++ because the language it's a behemoth, it tries to do everything and the syntax it's a Lovecraftan nightmare, full of legacy incompatibilities. For small games such as Cataclysm:DDA I'd use Go (and for system tools and internet services OFC) and for game engines Rust it's or even GC based languages (not Java) can do it well (C# with AOT).
Even Common Lisp it's fine (just look up Trial/Kandria) with SDL2/3 and/or OpenGL bindings (Vulkan ones should be somewhere). Pick SBCL for speed, learn CL, learn about SIMD and optimizations. It can beat C on performance.
https://www.stylewarning.com/posts/nbody/
EDIT: the bindings are cl-vulkan, of course.
I am not certain if C (apart from inline assembly) can generate all possible machine code, and some translations can be fragile (autovectorization, e.g.).
But, yes, terms like "the speed of C" do not seem especially useful.
Even "equal effort" ignores the complexity of the effort-to-benefit function as well as maintainability issues and other considerations like finding good programmers who want to use the language.
Reality seems to be very complex.
This problem is overstated. There's no safety/performance tradeoff here. Rust has shown that extensive safety checks can be applied at compile time with zero runtime overhead.
For a concrete example, checking that an array access is in bounds at runtime does come with a performance penalty. However it's also possible to prove at compile time that an array index can never escape it's array bounds. And, if it's not possible to prove this statically - you should be heavily questioning the security of that code.
at the cost of developing time and workarounds overhead.
> And, if it's not possible to prove this statically - you should be heavily questioning the security of that code.
or that's exactly the compromise that allows you to develop that software
there is no 100% safety with zero overhead
it is not possible
> the competing language will have a runtime cost, which often is unacceptable.
The problem you now mention
> at the cost of developing time and workarounds overhead.
Also happens with plain c and the "pay attention" method.
not really
there are decades of well known practices to basically cover every possible scenario
the point is Rust doesn't allow to write certain kinds of code or use certain patterns
it's the cost of the boilerplate
it's not that it is hard, it's that it is tedious
and if we throw LLM at the problem, well, we're not talking about 100% safety anymore
Let me rephrase: you are saying that tedious following of best practices (using or not certain kinds of code or use or certain patterns) does not take extra time in c, but rust (compiler) not allowing to write certain kinds of code or use certain patterns does take extra time.
WUFFS provides strong concrete evidence. A WUFFS image decoder is entirely safe because that was the whole point, but it's also a lot faster because since we've proved this is safe we don't need any of these safeguards and precautions you'd want in languages which aren't sure. We cannot do anything wrong, so there's no need for the compiler to add bounds checks for example never mind Fil-C's "shadow" memory.
Now, WUFFS pays a price for that, it's not a General Purpose Language. You can't write "Hello, World" in WUFFS because it doesn't have strings for the message or I/O to emit the message somewhere. But we should be clear eyed about how much we're paying when we insist we need generality. Not just safety, performance.
I miss one of the most important points for me:
C is a very easy to learn programming language (I explicitly do not claim that it is easy to write correct/bug free programs in C) and for me even more important: The mental model of a computer/abstract machine that C exemplifies (memory, pointers, pointer arithmetic, functions) is unbelievably useful for understanding and coming to terms with nearly all kind of programming languages/computer programs. Of course the mental model is wrong, but boy is it useful.
Would I start a new project in C if I can help it? Never. Would I use any other language than C if I want to implement a small part of a program which benefits from a C like low level language? I would not say never, but I do not see any candidate language at this moment. Especially because small programs in C IMHO are manageable for a reasonable experienced programmer.
I would love to life in an alternate reality where something like LISP/Scheme would be the basic model of computation (lambda calculus) and everything else would build on this as a useful mental model, though! :-)
Of note, C3 is alive and well, with the latest release (0.8.3) just last week.
I stumbled upon the language earlier this year and love it. I like plain C a lot, but it's a rough experience. Having slices, modules, a strong stdlib and memory management massively improve the experience. The compiler is a 2MB binary compared to the ridiculously huge Rust/Cargo toolchain. I also found LLMs to be really good at writing it, made a simple skill [1] that gets even Claude Haiku to write correct code. Have been using it for several projects and really enjoying it.
Zig seems to be most prominent C alternative today, well funded, with some high-profile support, excellent engineering and both a loyal fanbase and haters.
That said, as longtime C user, I've been tempted by Jai and Zig and C3, but I am not ready to make the switch yet. The benefits are simply not big enough.
And there is something new that was not apparent in when this article was written: a lot of code is LLM written now, giving old and mainstream language an undeniable advantage. Also, Rust, with the built-in safeguards, is pretty AI assistance friendly.
So to win these people you need to have a killer feature that can win them, Rust offers it. The Jai, C3, Zig, etc, do not.
Sure, they are better Cs, but that's not enough to switch.
So eventually, all those C killers will keep growing, among newer system programmers, but not much among seasoned C devs.
It's also not always clear they are "better". The Handmade Community, from which this essay and several of these "better C" languages ultimately spring has some weird ideas about what constitutes "better".
Handmade is Casey Muratori's thing. If you understand it as "This one guy did a video essay series and it all got a bit out of hand" it makes more sense. A twenty first century "Life of Brian" but for software engineering. He's not the Messiah, he's just some guy who was asked his opinion.
They're certainly different which is a key requirement to be better that is often not met by "audiophile" technologies, so that's something. Several of them have some Spatial Memory Safety features (ie bounds checking), which is a thing C doesn't provide out of the box for example [but see Fil-C].
I spent decades writing C for money and for pleasure, and I don't write C any more, I write Rust. But then I was never Casey's audience. For one thing of course, by the time "Handmade Hero" was published I was a long way into my career as a programmer, so it's not really "for" me even if I wanted to make video games (I do not want to make video games).
Rust made the mistake of thinking it can be low level AND safe. It tried to have the cake and eat it too. That will be its downfall.
Nice ragebait tentative though.
Generally, in an ideal low-level language I wouldn't expect to be hampered because the language is designed for a notional abstract machine that doesn't have things like an actual stack and contiguous RAM.
Having any model at all is probably most of the value and only one part of the model (consume ordering) is unimplementable fantasy so it could have been much worse, but it's hardly a triumph for a "fundamental" language is it?
I think the machines C was conceived for are small enough by today's standards that I would not bring a high level language (like C) to the fight, a macro assembler and you'll be fine. For today's much larger machines, use Rust.
Oh you've got 16-bit addressing? Chart all the addresses and what you'll use them for on a white board or a big sheet of paper. You do not need "allocators" like malloc, that's Steve's job, Steve has a sharpie to "allocate" memory on the chart.
Yes you can statically allocate, but who wants an artificial limitation like "16 strings, 256 bytes each" when some users want 200 strings of 8 bytes and some users want 4 strings of 500 bytes. Static allocation is something you can do when your memory is large compared to your use cases.
Isn't Rust's solution mostly the same, just with C++20?
https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/atomics.html
> Rust pretty blatantly just inherits the memory model for atomics from C++20.
In C this is a platform specific problem, for Unix systems you want pthreads for example while Windows provides a different arrangement.
Rust does not provide out-of-the-box structured concurrency - which I would like - but it's a lot closer to what I'd prefer here.
I could be wrong. I haven't worked a lot with it.
> thinking it can be low level AND safe.
"low level and unsafe" is something that people will eventually get tired of once there is a big enough disaster. Or at least start slapping Prop 65 warnings on unsafe products.
So probably you're instead thinking "C is like an assembly language" and that's entirely wrong. The C abstract machine is very weird. No machines exactly like that have ever existed or will ever be built, so you're not programming a real machine. The closest ones were in the 1970s, machines today are very different.
IMO the worst outcome of this "Oh C is just assembler" nonsense is the compound volatile operations.
You probably imagine a line of C like `foo |= 1` ensures `foo` has the LSB set right? You may or may not realise that "Set the LSB of a location in memory" isn't an operation most CPUs have but hey, in C it was a single operation so...
As a hack when compilers got smarter C also has a "volatile" type qualifier, so `foo` can have the type qualifier "volatile" meaning that updates to this variable will definitely happen in memory, the compiler won't just keep `foo` in a CPU register to accelerate things, it has promised to write it back to memory...
So now, `foo |= 1` looks like a single CPU operation which should set the LSB of foo. But of course your CPU probably can't actually do that, so what's really emitted by your C compiler is read foo from memory into a CPU register, set the LSB of that register and then write the whole register back to memory. Which is three distinct operations in sequence, and thus now it can be interrupted by other work and then carry on, despite the fact that meanwhile foo changed...
Oops. The C looks fine, but the machine code generated may introduce a massive bug.
If you do want a language with assembly, Rust provides that. It provides both inline assembler which you can use inside your Rust functions, and bare assembly. Of course that's not safe Rust, but presumably if you wanted to write assembly you were on board with taking the responsibility.
People who say this know neither C nor assembly.
Ridiculous take
By lame, I don't mean in a bad way. I mean, it is pretty harmless or non-offensive. I am amused by the fact that you were afraid to say it in your regular id..
In the case of established codebases the issue is that we don't want to rewrite them because they're huge and not very well designed usually. There are no unit tests or not many and we cannot break ABI compatibility and so on. So change has a risk. Also you're trying to get other developers to agree to the change and they are often in a post-nuclear-war state about other technical decisions and certainly don't want to start another one about some language they don't understand.
What we really need is some way to progressively improve big codebases without having to swallow a huge pill. In other words I need to be able to work a file at a time with something that fits exactly into the build system that is building the C code.
At the moment I'm using ESQL to embed Informix queries - this is a subtly quite good language extension that certainly makes life better except of course that it ties us to a specific expensive database etc etc. As an improvement on C it works in it's limited sphere.
In this huge project there's so much code that it's hard to know what's the right way to do anything and the same solutions have been written again and again in slightly different ways.
Half the libraries have circular dependencies such that they only build with an odd little trick and it's extremely difficult to know the precise reasons why this design evolved or how to begin unpicking those dependencies. Without tests any change could be a disaster.
One established way of improving on C is to use a DSL or something like embedded TCL such that most of the time you're not actually writing C. The current project went the DSL route and it's very very much better than nothing but without a grammar the parser is hard to maintain. I've been on a project using TCL and that was excellent - loading and parsing a config file, for example, is something one almost never really needs to do in C and there are many bits of a program that TCL can do much more reliably and perfectly fast enough.
This ramble is trying to convey that a new language presents a problem to people who have 100 problems already. If you can make it help with those 100 problems then it will win.
Successful example: Converting to Git from SCCS is a huge pain but I've just done it (had to infer changesets from individual file version usernames and dates and times :/ ) but Git is well worth the trouble because it's so much less stressful to make mistakes with and vastly easier to do reviews and so on.
No solution, suggestion or wisdom here, just agreement.
Because "cc prog.c; ./a.out" offers you the most direct way to interact with your system. Because "man 2 mmap" documents a C API. Because "nm" lists your functions and global variables with the exact same names as the C program.
The relative "lack of features" in comparison to its "better" alternatives is what makes it preferable. It lets you concentrate on the inherent complexity of the problem you are solving, and not on the opinions of vocal people online.
Except for anything more complex than a hello world program, it needs to be something like
cc -Wall -Wextra -Werror -O3 -lm -lfoo -lbar -fsanitize -fno-nasal-demons -o prog prog.c src/one.c src/two.c src/three.c src/four.c src/subdir/something.cFor instance:
"The C language is not just the language itself but all the developer tools developed for the language. Do you want to do static analysis on your source code?"
This is a finite problem set. For instance, AI could auto-create useful toolings eventually. And even without AI, people can. Even more so if a new language is designed with that in mind from the get go. So, perhaps it would be a lot of effort, but this is really not the reason why C is so dominating.
> The uncertainties of a new language
> Before a language has matured, it's likely to have bugs and might change significantly to address problems with language semantic.
Here I somewhat agree. Another language is different, that is true, and may not be better, that is also true. I am still not convinced Rust is better than C, for instance.
However had, I also don't this this as unsolvable. Many new languages are in part better than C. I mean, I notice this when I write ruby code and C code. Let's ignore the speed problem; and the fact that ruby is written mostly in C (which kind of shows that C dominates everything). The ruby code I write is about 1000000000x easier to understand, simpler and almost always shorter than C. There is no comparison here. Ruby is the better programming language. C is faster and more efficient. And this is also significant. My prediction is that a language that would be able to replace C, needs to target both the speed issue without compromise AND the efficiency of writing code, be it ruby-like, python-like and so forth. And neither of these two languages try to replace C either, so they don't quite count here.
> And what about maintainers? Sure, an open source language can be forked, but I doubt many companies are interested in using a language that they further down the line might be forced to maintain.
This is a problem, but you have this problem with corporations too. For instance, Go is controlled by Google, as is Flutter/Dart. Google can babble that everyone can contribute but the reality of the situation is that Google decides what happens; same with the adChromium code base. Personally I really don't want corporations to dictate their world view onto a language. Committees can also have problems or be bribed and what not, we can see the chaos in the C++ committee too, even without bribery - stupidity often rules supreme. But by and large, I much prefer single benevolent dictators or indepedent (as much as possible) committees than mega-evil mega-huge greedy corporations controlling a language. This does not automatically mean a language is better or worse, either way, but it is a preference for me. And I know for a fact that many others somewhat or strongly agree with this too, except a few die-hard Google fanbois (but most of them are employed by Google anyway, so their "opinion" does not count; I see the same problem with shopify and ruby, by the way, it's really interesting).
> 3. The language might just not be good enough > Is the language even addressing the real pain points of C? It turns out that people don't always agree on what the pain points with C is.
Yup, that is also true, see Rust. On the other hand, I think cargo is really useful, and even C++ agreed. I think C also did not that long ago, but boy, for many decades C thought that easy download of add-ons is not needed. C changes very slowly. I understand that this is often nice, but just as in the example of cargo and what not, this was really STUPID of C to not change here.
Other than that I agree on the general point. Many changes are also idiotic in other languages. Ruby incorporated many idiotic changes too; thankfully I can avoid most of them so I just ignore them indeed.
> A new language will naturally have a much smaller pool of experienced developers. For any middle to large company that's a huge problem. The more developers there are available for a company, the better they like it.
That's also true, e. g. look how few developers use D. I think the only way to change this is to make the language SIMPLE, EASY but also efficient at the same time. Like python. Though python is not aiming to be a replacement of C, so it does not count - but people are quite easily able to learn and use it. C is much harder to use; just give new recruits a task to implement things that manipulate memory and pointers a lot.
> The C ABI is the standard for interoperability
Any language can have that too so I don't see this as a problem.
> 1. Better syntax
> Having a "better syntax" than C is mostly subjective.
Wrong. And this is what 99% of those "I will replace C with my language XYZ" get wrong. The syntax they use usually SUCKS. They think syntax matters absolutely not at all. They are wrong. But they think they are right, so they write a useless pile of crap and then wonder why nobody writes in that language.
> 2. Safer than C > Any C alternative will be expected to be on par with C in performance. The problem is that C have practically no checks, so any safety checks put into the competing language will have a runtime cost, which often is unacceptable.
This is partially correct, partially wrong. Rust showed that safety is a feature; C++ agreed. C does not. I understand the speed penalty, and I am not saying you need to make safety a pseudo-religion like Rust did, but that trade-off needs to be determinable by the code author. So, some code can be fast like in C; for other code the trade-off may be different. A language should make it super-easy to distinguish here. Rust does not make it super-easy. C even less.
> Programmer productivity
> First of all, pretty much all languages ever will make vacuous claims of "higher programmer productivity". The problem is that for a business this usually doesn't matter. Why? Because the actual programming is not the main time sink. In a business, what takes time is to actually figure out what the task really is. So something like a 10% or 20% "productivity boost" won't even register. A 100% increase in productivity might show, but even that isn't guaranteed.
Also totally wrong. Yes, writing code is not always the bottle neck, but what he forgets is the simplicity of writing good, fast code. If it takes 5 hours to write 3 lines of code, something is wrong with the language itself.
C++ tried this. You can use null-terminated char arrays like in C, or you can use std::string and it works like Python or Ruby. C++'s problem is that by having so many features to please everyone, the interactions between some of the features are less than obvious, and there's always some feature you're encountering for the first time.