However, I hope that these C applications are written by people who are really good at C. I know that some of these Python applications are written by people who discovered the language as they deployed into production.
That’s a measure of programming prowess, not the actual security concern at hand.
If the masterful C developer still insists on using a language that has so many footguns and a weird culture of developers pretending that they’re more capable than they are, then their C mastery could very well’ve not been worth much against someone throwing something together in Python, which will at the very least immediately bypass the vast majority of vulnerabilities found in C code. Plus, my experience with such software is that the sort of higher level vulnerabilities that you’d still see in Python code aren’t ones that the C developer has necessarily dealt with.
However, I hope that these C applications are written by people who are really good at C. I know that some of these Python applications are written by people who discovered the language as they deployed into production.