I estimate that I've written about half a million lines of C code and I will have to strongly disagree with that. Manual memory management just isn't that much

I estimate that I've written about half a million lines of C code and I will have to strongly disagree with that. Manual memory management just isn't that much of a big deal once you are experienced enough with C to organize your software into modules (usually individual C files with one corresponding header file). You just encapsulate the creation and destruction of elaborate data structures so that it's easy to verify that everything is cleaned up correctly. These days I program mostly in Java and I spend a lot more time tracking down memory leaks than I ever did while I was programming in C.