Then why not write a rebuttal and ask for his feedback? It's impossible to anticipate every possible counter to an argument, and it would be prohibitive to list and rebut them all within a single message.

> Plenty of great software is written in C++, even using STL, that doesn't lead to software that is any more difficult to maintain than the equivalent C program.

I don't deny that great software is written in C++, but what is your evidence that C and C++ have the same maintenance burden.