There's an interesting article here talking about the spirit of early C.
http://www.artima.com/cppsource/spiritofc.html
# Trust the programmer.
# Don't prevent the programmer from doing what needs to be done.
# Keep the language small and simple.
# Provide only one way to do an operation.
# Make it fast, even if it is not guaranteed to be portable.
It strikes me that nowadays PureBasic fits this spirit far better than any of C's descendants.
