Lately I've been catching up on the state of the art in bootstrapping. Check out the live-bootstrap project. stage0 starts with a seed "compiler" of a couple hundred bytes that basically turns hex codes into bytes while stripping comments. A series of such text files per architecture work their way up to a full macro assembler, which is then used to write a mostly architecture-independent minimal C compiler, which then builds a larger compiler written in this subset of C. This then bootstraps a Scheme in which a full C compiler (mescc) is written, which then builds TinyCC, which then builds GCC 4, which works its way up to modern GCC for C++... It's a fascinating read:
https://github.com/oriansj/stage0
https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part...
Even if no one is "using" this it should still be a primary motivator for keeping C simple.
Just as you yourself described, one can absolutely target a platform from scratch with C99, Forth, Lua, a Pascal, a modernish Basic dialect, or some form of Lisp without building the largest, most modern compiler first. Once you have a compiler or even an interpreter for any of those, one can use it to create a compiler for something bigger and more modern. In fact, that's precisely where C was originally targeted - as a portable bootstrap language to various hardware platforms.
On the other hand, one can also target a new platform via LLVM. Both options have their merits and drawbacks.
The implication is that if it is simple to write a parser for a language, then the language is simple to read.
See also: Brainfuck, Forth, Chinese
Linking this makes me nostalgic for 2010 :)
