C isn't that hard; you certainly have to approach things in a pretty different way, and it does have a slower curve to productivity, but once you get past the hurdle of having less abstraction (i.e. mostly by just not making pointless abstractions, and having general utilities for the cases you do need some) and learn "gdb -ex r ./program <enter> [wait for crash] bt <enter>" to get a stacktrace, it's, give or take, usable.