I’m linking to this pretty old rant from Linus Torvalds (here’s his blog) on the merits of C vs C++ so that I can just point people to this blog post when the topic arises.
This portion of the rant in particular resonates with me:
In other words, the only way to do good, efficient, and system-level and portable C++ ends up to limit yourself to all the things that are basically available in C. And limiting your project to C means that people don’t screw that up, and also means that you get a lot of programmers that do actually understand low-level issues and don’t screw things up with any idiotic “object model” crap.
I’m happy to stick to C for compiled code and intepreted languages for higher-level code… C++ is just an odd middle-place that was simultaneously too early and too late.