At the time Perl and Python (to use your examples) were first being developed, C++ was an unstable, unstandardized language.
Unfortunately, the impression that C++ is slow, bloated, unstandardized and buggy persists, despite several decades of progress. It's a battle we fight every day in the modern native software world. Between the people who see the obvious forward progress that has been made with C++ and those who choose to cling to obsolete and disproven "facts" while never managing to make a rational argument for their case.
I really don't have a problem if somebody wants to use C to develop something. I'm simply claiming that I'll get there faster than you, with more accuracy and stability, by using a better tool.