Don't get me wrong, I like C - especially on small problems. I don't get the feeling that I'm creating something flexible with C, though, it's very much bespoke and tailored. I get involved in micromanagement of fine details. This is OK for a small problem, but extremely aggravating for a big problem. As soon as I want higher level abstractions, and start building structs of function pointers and whatnot, I just shake my head - I'd rather write a parser and corresponding text generator than manually compile that into C.

C++ has been hobbled by the concept of a sufficiently smart compiler. It's so afraid of introducing abstractions that aren't cost-free, it tries to make them all optional, and the resulting explosion in feature combination means some combinations don't work well together, and then every big C++ project has to decide which set of features they'll adopt, and which ones they won't.

Give me the freedom to think closer to the problem, and even if the abstractions have some costs, and even if the compilers aren't quite sufficiently smart, the chances are I'll come up with algorithm improvements that meet speed and space requirements and let me move on to the next problem much sooner. Agility trumps hyper-optimization.