I find most languages are fairly simple. The std lib that goes along with them on the other hand... Those are the monsters in the room. Take java for example. Do you think java is verbose because it is java? Or is it because of the libraries you use?
When you boil code down to its bare essentials it is moving stuff from one part of memory with a possible transform to another. C does that exceedingly well and gets out of the way. However, the heavy price we pay for that is low type/bounds checking. Pretty much all other languages have tried to get the 'get out the way of part' but with type checking. Rust has taken the approach of you ask for memory and it is tracked at compile time. Not a bad idea. But it seems to trip some people up. Especially if you do not 'get' the idea of object/memory ownership. Which is something you have to do manually in C/C++. C++ has started to put wrappers around all this junk which helps.
When you boil code down to its bare essentials it is moving stuff from one part of memory with a possible transform to another. C does that exceedingly well and gets out of the way. However, the heavy price we pay for that is low type/bounds checking. Pretty much all other languages have tried to get the 'get out the way of part' but with type checking. Rust has taken the approach of you ask for memory and it is tracked at compile time. Not a bad idea. But it seems to trip some people up. Especially if you do not 'get' the idea of object/memory ownership. Which is something you have to do manually in C/C++. C++ has started to put wrappers around all this junk which helps.