C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.
Source is here. Many of you will recognize these words: it's a piece of Linus Torvalds' rant aganist C++, when some developers asked him to move Git from C to C++.
