I feel that it's a shame to test C rather than C++, because the latter offers so many advantages to developer productivity -- the paper cites memory management

I feel that it's a shame to test C rather than C++, because the latter offers so many advantages to developer productivity -- the paper cites memory management and type-related errors as being major causes of developer unproductivity, and C++ has automatic memory management and templates and such. Also, it doesn't restrict the use of C libraries, so even if you've been writing C for HPC code all these years, there should be minimal technical difficulties in switching over, except for the time it takes to learn C++, which shouldn't be long if you know C well.