Re: Will anyone really understand the language?
"You get landed with maintaining that code, you need to learn the peculiarities of this one guy's hybrid linked-list/b-tree data structures and his unique take on string storage."
And in C++ instead of yet-another-b-tree-implementation you get landed with another guys idea of what a templated abstracted inheritence tree should be. Normally involving endless factory methods and 10 levels of inheritence. In C it simply would be too much work to implement anything close to that so people are forced to simplify their mental designs.
Thats not an argument for C over C++, I'd be the first to admit that some standard things in C are just too painful - but C++ offering more standard functionality simply means it'll be abused in a higher level way than C.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
