Those kind of problems you mention aren't isolated to C, though. The exact same, or very similar, problems exist when using scripts written in Perl, Ruby, Python, and other scripting languages.
That, and the lack of a sufficiently-abstract concept of strings.
To wit, let's get the length of two strings in Ruby and C.
Ruby:
("aha" + "oho").length
char buffer[1024]; // lol i hope this doesn't overflow
memset(buffer,0,1024);
strcat(buffer, "aha");
strcat(buffer, "oho");
return strlen(buffer);
Oh, and is that string length including the null terminator (no)? And why do we even care about null terminators unless we're doing low-level memory frobbing?
Anyways, imagine that sort of arcana multiplied across every string operation in your dumb little script. It's awful.
strlen("ahaoho")