and that he knows a thing or two about pointer arithmetic. still C and C++ have a totally different approach to program design: A C project of non trivial size

and that he knows a thing or two about pointer arithmetic. still C and C++ have a totally different approach to program design: A C project of non trivial size will have lots of insane tricks with macros and callback functions, whereas C++ has entirely different methods of abstraction. I think that's a very significant difference. Also C++ has this std::unique_ptr<> thing that helps a lot with preventing memory leaks. And C++ has stl, so you won't have to write your own list/array/map abstractions.