[wvenable]

I do a lot of C++ programming and that's really over selling the issues. You don't have to read an entire book of variable initialization to do it correctly. And using STL types are a lot safer than passing pointers around.

It's actually far easier to me to tell that it's not leaking memory or accessing some unallocated data in the C++ version than the C version.

A simple language just pushes complexity from the language into the code. Being able to represent things in a more high-level way is entirely the point of this exercise because the C version didn't have the tools to express it more cleanly.