Based on this critique, the author would probably have found Go even more useful than C. He would not only have avoided the OO and exceptions mess he found problematic in C++, but also the tedious manual memory management in C/C++.
The two aren't remotely the same - I find it fairly tedious (but explicit, which is sometimes nice) in C, but reasonably painless in C++ with unique_ptr and similar things.
As has been mentioned in other comments on this article, treating the two as the same language, or versions of it, is a mistake.