"Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C"* His problem is a

"Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C"* His problem is assuming that there are no stupid programmers in C, and it can't be abused. I haven't had a career as long as Linus', but I've seen people abusing C more than C++, and writing their own inefficient implementation of extremely basic things.