Sorry, maybe I misread your comment. There are certainly languages easier to learn than C, but I would not say C++ or Rust fall into this category. At the same time, I find C compilation extremely fast exactly because of headers. In C you can split interface and implementation cleanly between header and c-file and this enables efficient incremental builds. In C++ most of the implementation is in headers, and all the template processing is order of magnitude more expensive than parsing C headers. Rust also does not seem to have proper separate compilation.