[Rusky]

You're not wrong, I wrote off the insubstantial stuff as rhetorical and started my comment with "being generous." :P

But on the other hand, even some of these less-helpful points have an element of truth:

* A lot of people/domains/codebases do wind up avoiding exceptions, for good reason. There is even an active proposal to provide an alternative kind of exceptions to solve their problems!

* Member function pointers are quite a mess, introducing a lot of complexity by not being compatible with regular function pointers. It wasn't until long after this article that those incompatibilities were papered over with the standard library.

* std::map::operator[]'s behavior arguably does not follow the principle of least surprise- it's a giant footgun.

The author goes out of his way to point out that the changes he wants don't require GC or an interpreter, despite all the comparisons to Python. It's not an insubstantial comparison in that light.