[PEJOE]

C is still a widely used and beautiful language. It is "safe," in the sense that the machine does more or less exactly what you ask it to. Allocate memory when you need it, and free it when you consume it / are done with it.

You do not have to use these features if you do not want to.

C++ is very powerful, and has an amazing world of libraries available, but sometimes I feel like it is at least two languages at the same time.

For example, one benefit of using C++ over C is writing C style programs with modern libraries and convenient containers in the STL, but you quickly learn that C style programming isn't supported across the board, and hitting that wall can be jarring and unexpected (Looking at you openCV - just try to allocate space for a struct containing a cv::Mat)