[Santosh83]

THIS is the reason IMO too. C++ has taken on the very difficult task of remaining broadly compatible with C and with legacy features while at the same time has continuously evolved over the decades, incorporating whatever was the state of the art at that time, without new features breaking old code. That is not an easy task without increasing complexity.

[pjmlp]

The book "Design and Evolution of C++" is quite interesting in that regard.

For all its warts, C++ only got adopted inside AT&T and later by almost every C compiler vendor, because it just fitted on their existing toolchains.

Even lack of modules is related to that, C++ object files needed to look just like C ones.

Now that C++ is grown up and can live on its own, it needs to pay for the crazy days of its parties going out with C. :)

[vram22]

>The book "Design and Evolution of C++" is quite interesting in that regard.

I found that book very interesting in many regards. I had bought and read it several years ago (out of interest, though I have not worked on C++ professionally).

Stroustrup goes into a lot of details about the reasons for many design decisions in the language. While I'm aware that C++ has some issues, I was really impressed by the level of thought etc., that he shows in that book, when he talks about all the reasons for doing various things the way he did them.

[Santosh83]

Some might say the party never ended. :-)

[Chathamization]

> incorporating whatever was the state of the art at that time

State of the art or flavor of the month? For instance, the features from functional programming that C++ and Java recently (in the last decade) added weren't anything new. When functional programming started to become more popular was when their features started showing up in C++ and Java.

If people are concerned that your language is already to large than adding elements from other programming paradigms because they're suddenly what's hot doesn't seem like a great idea. It feels like some languages are chasing the crowd, which can lead to a messy language ("OOP is all the rage now? Our language is all about OOP! Oh, functional is all the rage now? Well, we just nailed on some functional features!").

[gpderetta]

Eh, C++ can hardly be criticized to pandering to the flavor of the month.

For example, lambdas were finally added only in C++11 even though while the STL had a functional flavor since the late '90s and sorely needed lambda expressions. Only after people went out of their way to build lambdas on top of macros, expression templates and whatnot, they were finally added to the language.

[TheOtherHobbes]

It's true that isn't easy.

It's also true that it may not be necessary.

What makes a good language? One that randomly accumulates state of the art ideas about programming without breaking old code, or one that gets out of the way and allows requirements to be expressed reliably and relatively simply?

Of course C++ is used because it's fast. It's fine in limited domains like DSP.

But what is the rationale for a language that whimsically accumulates new features every couple of years, while failing to deal with basic challenges like memory management?

It's not as if it's ever going to reach a critical mass and turn into Haskell.