@bonifartius

The more complex C declarations are sure hell, no defense from me for those.

I had forgotten that even Go uses "name: Type", as a language designed by the designers of C no less...

IMO even Java does it better though, by just fixing the most stupid aspects of the C declaration syntax, and dropping explicit pointer and function-pointer types in favor of classes and generics. E.g.:

String[] foo; // Instead of "String foo[]" which is legal but considered bad style.

An interface with a single method is equivalent to a function type, so:

interface IntMapper {
int map(int x);
}

int[][] mapIntMatrix(int[][] original, IntMapper mapper);

Alternatively, using the built-in generic interface Function<T, R>:

int[][] mapIntMatrix(int[][] original, Function<Integer, Integer> mapper);

(Sadly type parameters can't be primitive types so we have to use the Integer class there.)

Nested type parameters:

HashMap<String, List<Function<X, Y>>> hashMapFromStringsToListOfFunctions;

If you combine the generics syntax with <> and the primitive array syntax with [] you can get wonky things like "List<X>[]" to mean array of lists of x, but that pretty much never occurs since primitive arrays are pretty much reserved for special cases in Java and you'll use List instead most of the time, like List<List<X>> instead of List<X>[].