Yes, that's a large part of what I meant in my post.
By a "simple" language I mean one with less "features" as compared to more. In exchange for (possibly) increasing programmer's productivity and reducing number of lines of code to perform a task, a more complex language increases mental demand on the programmer, because he or she needs to (should!) understand how all those extra features interact in a variety of situations. It's a double-edged sword.
As far as "modeling current hardware".. C seems to me to provide the least possible complexity (in terms of features and also length of formal language specification) in a language which is capable of programming a Turing machine.. which is basically how modern hardware works, unless I am missing something. For example, functional programming languages like Scheme make an effect to NOT model the hardware that the programs will eventually run on, but instead to abstract away this dependency. On the other hand, things like Brain........ shows that a language still needs to be human-understandable to be at all practical, even though even simpler than C.
Also, I do not wish to incite any argument in this thread and I am sorry it seems to have turned out that way..