It seems to me that what Bjarne likes about C++ over C is its provision of copious quantities of syntactic sugar - turning things that are perfectly expressible in C into supposedly more 'natural' formulations. I suppose if you like cancer of the semicolon, C++ may be the right place for you, but in my opinion if you really want abstraction you should be using lisp (the simple, unbound syntax makes every function you implement act like an extension of the core language), and otherwise you should use C.

Of course, I'm atypical - when I'm not writing in C it's because I'm writing asm.