That's vaguely what I meant when I said that C isn't a great applications language but C++ is a passable one. Different languages are well suited for different tasks, and if you use the wrong language for the task you'll always end up with a mess. So sometimes C++ is more suitable than C. And sometimes some other language entirely is more suitable. But the language design of C--compared to C++--is a masterpiece of clean and simple design.
The bottom line is that they are both rather ugly but practical languages. C++ offers more abstraction means, but is more complex. But for larger projects, I'd rather have that then GLib style hacked up C.