Good point, but the sort of utilities, data munging code I typically write, can be hammered out in C, or C++ pretty fast.

I've been easing into the C++ standard library, lambdas etc., and familiarity makes it easy to write code that uses standard proven, fast, data structures, and mostly allows me to avoid any non-stack data allocation.

Avoiding heap memory allocation, and taking advantage of the appropriate idioms, allows much faster development, even in C++.

The huge bonus when done correctly, is very high-performance, clear and portable code.