I've thought about this a lot. C++ is good for most programming. There is no other general purpose language that works as well as it does for large teams. Java is a bloated, insecure piece of shit. C#/CLR/Mono is similarly slow as fuck and is most likely a Swiss cheese full of _NSAKEYs. FIOC, LISP, Ruby, MATLAB, and Perl are good for certain niches, but not as general purpose as C++. Memory management is not hard to do. No need to sour your programs before they're written by tying yourself to some insecure VM.
C will always be good enough. You miss out on a lot of ``fancy abstractions,'' but real programmers program for specific situations and don't give a shit about ``design.'' I say use C and program in a C style. That way it stays portable and compatible with other languages. The choice between C and C++ is just a matter of choice. No one cares. There is no difference in time to write programs.