The central problem of C and C++ is that they require programmers to do their own memory management

Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.

Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.

When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.

Why the hell hasn't wxPython become the standard GUI for Python yet?

The Wesnoth devs are good but not exceptionally so, and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++). Nevertheless our productivity, in terms of goals achieved per hour of work, is quite high.

Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.