> I wrote this after repeatedly seeing experienced C programmers hit the same sharp edges while moving into modern C++ codebases.

...I've seen this more often in the opposite direction. Since C++ is stuck with a ca 1995 non-standard subset of C, C++ coders usually have a very outdated view of C.

> I’d also be curious which C constructs people still genuinely miss in modern C++.

Not implementing the full C99 designated init feature set was a huge missed opportunity in C++20. Every single feature of C99 designated init is important and clicks with the other features and the rest of the language, take one or two away and it becomes mostly useless (e.g. the order requirement in C++20 means that designated init is only useful for trvial structs).

It's especially tragic because Clang already had the full C99 designated init feature set in C++ mode implemented long before C++20 and it worked just fine.

> The interesting part to me isn’t "C vs C++," but where the languages diverged philosophically

IMHO this "schism" was completely unnecessary and only happened because of ignorance and hubris by the C++ designers. Objective-C shows that C can be extended with radical new features but without messing up the "C side" (e.g. ObjC features don't overlap with C features, which means that ObjC is automatically compatible with the latest C standards).

In the end it's not a big deal of course, C and C++ are now entirely different languages and longterm that's for the better. Even the C++ peeps seem to have come to that realization and no longer recommend to "compile C in C++ mode" (like Herb Sutter in 2012 when trying to justify why MSVC had no C99 support: https://herbsutter.com/2012/05/03/reader-qa-what-about-vc-an...):

    "We recommend that C developers use the C++ compiler to compile C code (using /TP if the file is named something.c). This is the best choice for using Visual C++ to compile C code."

This was bad advice back then and is even worse advice today. At least MSVC got "good enough" C99 support a couple of years later (in VS2015), but after a few hopeful years after 2019 it looks like MSVC development has completely stalled again.