It is weird that microsoft is never mentioned in these articles, despite their monopoly on software in public administration, education and healthcare.
Microsoft isn't mentioned because the world shifted in such a manner where Microsoft's monopoly is no longer as important. Nobody could have predicted this in the 80s and 90s, and this situation should be a learning lesson as to why antitrust measures should be extremely rare.
Previous attempts to doing this have introduced unnecessary ugliness to the language such as the possibility to mix declarations with code. I can only see the language getting worse by introducing new pointless features. Unnecessary bloated C already exists and it is called C++
By "mix declarations with code", do you mean the ability to put local variables like `int x;` in locations other than immediately at the start of a function? I don't understand why this is a bad thing.
(In C you can have local variables inside any block, e.g. 'if' or 'for'.) It's subjective, of course, but I find it much clearer to have a dedicated place to look for variables.
Actually it is block, not function. It makes it very difficult to read the code if you are looking for the scope of the variables, or investigating stack usage.
