[lelanthran]

> Surely your criteria should be some combination of the two (plus other factors).

Sure, but the weighting would be different for different people.

> C may have fewer footguns than C++, but it still has many, whilst also lacking many useful features

We are not talking "2 fewer footguns", or "5 fewer footguns"; we are talking "dozens fewer footguns".

When I need a language with more features than C, I don't choose C++, because the choice is not "Use C for simplicity, and use C++ to trade simplicity off against features", it's usually "Use C for simplicity, and use Java/C#/Go/Rust for features".