Yup. The day I discovered "smart" pointers was the day I vowed to never use C++ again. I mean this is a language that touts being close to the metal as an advantage, and then it allows you to create something that looks like a pointer but doesn't fit into the space for a pointer. Genius...

I'll take C any day of the week, and if I need some higher level features, I'll either write a precompiler that can parse my higher level features before generating C code, or I'll write a bindings generator to connect to Javascript/Ruby (I've used both options successfully in the past).