[wrsh07]

If you think that languages iterate simply to add stuff, I don't think you understand language development as well as you think.

Maybe you're being glib, and that's fine. But improving build times, metaprogramming (which greatly simplifies many libraries), adding lazy ranges, more powerful type inference, better error messages - these are all improvements.

The fact is, better metaprogramming means c++ gets smaller, because you don't have to learn separate languages for run time vs compile time computation.

If you think the development of c++ in the past few years is anything short of amazing, you're quite mistaken.