It's a citation, but not of the right type. You say it has been proven false that large C++ programs were more maintainable than large C programs. Such a proo

It's a citation, but not of the right type. You say it has been proven false that large C++ programs were more maintainable than large C programs. Such a proof would be quite extraordinary, to say the least. There is a vast difference between a strongly held opinion that this is true and a proof. Your proposed citations: something in Code Complete (where? what does he say exactly?), lectures you've seen at Georgia Tech (which? where? what is claimed?), and a slide showing that in some codebase (again, which?) a given C++ bug took longer to fix than a given C bug (what was the sample set? how many bugs in each language were there overall? was it the same program implemented in both languages, or something else? were they the same programmers?). None of these things are citations of a proof. Listen, I don't doubt there are some good arguments against C++. But to claim something is proven is a very strong claim indeed, and not IMO supported by the evidence you've cited. Can we say, instead, that the advantages of C++ are "contested"? Or "debatable"? Or that some C programs are more maintainable than some similar, but different C++ programs by different authors? I could agree with that...