Why does C code look like an alien language?

[severach]

Because you haven't practiced at it. C is the best second language I know. Cobol and Fortran and Basic all look cryptic to me. Those languages have a lot of keywords and huge libraries. If you weren't familiar with all those by working it regularly those languages would be alien to you too.

By contrast C has a small library, few keywords, and makes writing as terse as possible. Rather than begin, end, next, then; C has braces {}. That's what I expect to see and anything larger hurts my eyes. Why should I look for BEGIN when I can much more easily look for {?

C is plenty easy to learn. It just takes some practice. As a side benefit you get to use one of the best IDEs in the business.

[Romashka]

while I agree that {} instead of begin/end is just different, not worse (or better) syntax,
complex declarations involving pointers and arrays look ugly (and often hard to "decypher" by quick look) comparing to how the same can be done in D (and even very verbose Pascal style declarations are more easily "decyphered").

[MT]

It IS an alien language but is happens to be the de-facto language which is why we all use it. I has all the power of assembler but none of the friendliness of BASIC. FreeBasic is changing this and unless you have a good reason to use C I would check it out.