I don't know, Ada, Modula-2, Object Pascal, PL/I, NEWP, PL.8, D, Zig, Mesa, ATS,....
But then again, you booby trapped the question with popular language.
Many of those languages do not have pointers - which are fundamental to how modern instruction sets work.
Yes they do, point an example from that group, and I will gladly prove you wrong.
Well sounds like you are confident and we are going to get into a semantic argument about what qualifies as a pointer.
So which of these languages do you think is a better representation of hardware and not a PDP-11?
Better representation of the hardware?
None of them, you use Assembly if you want the better representation of hardware.
Yes, I am quite confident, because I have been dispelling the C myth of the true and only systems programming language since the 1990's.
So then your comment about C being an outdated PDP-11 must be equally true of other languages. So it says nothing.
If a language is unpopular, people won't want to work for you and you'll run into poor support. Rewriting a library may take months of dev time, whereas C has an infinite number of libraries to work with and examples to look at.
wears math hat
C does not have an infinite number of libraries and examples. The number of libraries and examples C has is quite large, and there are an infinite number of theoretically possible libraries and examples, but the number of libraries and examples that exist are finite.
Moving goalposts regarding systems programming languages features, some on the group predate C by a decade.
Being old doesn't mean anyone knows the language. I mean if the language predates C significantly and nobody uses is then there's probably a really good for it. The goalposts aren't moving they're just missing the shot
Popularity isn't a measure of quality. Never has been and certainly not in the case of programming languages.
There is unpopular - and then there is can I get a working toolchain for modern OS that’s not emulated.
Still not a measure of quality.
Are we having a discussion about the greatest language of all time? What’s your context here.