[jensa1948]

Eric S. Raymond's article is indeed interesting, but it doesn't contain a lot of real arguments. I find most of them to be anecdotes and they are not very convincing. The most convincing one is that people who are not proficient in C++ write code with horrible errors, and that is because the language contains so many subtle (and obvious) ways to shoot yourself in the head.

Most of the problems C++ has are coming from being backward-compatible with outdated language features, explicitly the C-subset. Even the problems with the toolchain are more less inherited from the C compile-link model and its use of the preprocessor as a "module" system.

If you use the language as intended, e.g. in the C++ core guidelines, you will se very nice language emerging which enables to write very efficient and elegant code, sometimes doing things that C cannot do, such as expression templates.

[sjellis]

"If you use the language as intended, e.g. in the C++ core guidelines, you will se very nice language emerging which enables to write very efficient and elegant code, sometimes doing things that C cannot do, such as expression templates."

JavaScript is also an ongoing effort to extract and evolve a good working language out of a mass of features. It's obviously doable, but not easy, and there are a lot of problems in practice.