That might just be an age thing: older languages seem particularly bad at this. Lisp has its cars and its cdrs, but C is even worse with ioctl, atoi, fputc, strxfrm and so on.

Assembly is worse yet, and mixing C with assembly is basically a path to Lovecraftian madness: I really hate the way intrinsics look. Here's a real snippet from StackOverflow:

    a_i = __mm_load_ps(&A[n*i+k]);
    b_i = __mm_load_ps(&B[n*k+j]);
    c_i = __mm_load_ps(&C[n*i+j]);

    __m128d tmp1 = __mm_mul_ps(a_i,b_i);
    __m128d tmp2 = __mm_hadd_ps(tmp1,tmp1);
    __m128d tmp3 = __mm_add_ps(tmp2,tmp3);
    __mm_store_ps(&C[n*i+j], tmp3)

You can also go too far in the other direction: see Java and especially Objective C.