[mattnewport]

In my experience C++ may seem more complex to understand initially than something like Python but once you invest some time to really understand it then it is much less mysterious / less of a black box than an interpreted or JITed language, particularly when dealing with anything performance sensitive, because nothing is hidden from you under layers of abstraction that persist at runtime yet are relatively opaque to your debugging or profiling tools.

One of the nice features about C++ IMO is that there is very little "magic" in the standard library. Unlike some languages, all the features of the standard library can be implemented with standard language facilities that are available to you for use in your own code. Some of the more complex areas of the language however are there primarily to support library authors writing very general code and you don't need to fully grok them to be an effective user of the language. Learning about some of them over time however will likely pay dividends for your own code even if you are not writing widely used libraries.