Opposition to any programming paradigms and concepts related to those paradigms which are not possible or very awkward to use in C. These include things like object-oriented design, abstraction, etc.
Bullshit. Structures cover most of what a programmer needs from OOP and C does of course support abstraction.
for(i = 0; i < strlen(line); i++)
{
...
doSomethingWith(line);
...
}
Nobody sane actually does that.
As for the quality of the code, in order to see what kind of code C leads to it's simply enough to take almost any open source C program out there and examine how it has been done. Just as an example let's take the mplayer software, which is the most popular media player in Linux. Let's examine, for example, its libavcodec/h264.c file:
This one single file has a whopping 8306 lines of code. As an example of a function, the fill_caches() function in this file is a whopping 462 lines long, and looks like this. (The few comments in that code are worth reading.) As an example of another function, the decode_mb_cavlc() function, which is 492 lines long and looks like this.
Video decoding code is always ugly, no matter the language. This is FUD.
His claim that using the STL causes "inefficient abstracted programming models" is simply not true. Using STL right causes the program to be more efficient, a lot safer and much easier to understand and maintain.
The STL is terrible as it encourages the programmer not to care about which data structure is adequate for what ey's doing.
In the vast majority of cases when a C-hacker hears the term "object-oriented" or "class", what he actually hears is "virtual functions", and his prejudiced brain immediately makes the connection "virtual functions → slow → bad", and they immediately become completely deaf to anything else. They seem to think that using classes means that you absolutely must use inheritance (not true), you must use virtual functions (not true) and that virtual functions are extremely slow (not true).
Firstly, virtual functions are very slow. If your entire programs rely on them, the performance degradation isn't negligible. Secondly, what's the point of using classes over structs if you don't use inheritance?
What SEPPLESers don't understand, is that the choice of C over SEPPLES isn't primarily a question of language, but of mentality. It is the faith in non-bloated software, the hope to disprove Wirth's law, the conviction that laziness isn't an excuse for unreasoned use of abstractions.