[Hemospectrum]

The popularity of C++ took off at a time when its competition was C. Not modern C, but C89 and older. Oceans of ink have been spilled describing the quality-of-life improvements that early C++ made over contemporary C. It is only with hindsight that we see how flawed these improvements were, and how other languages might achieve them with more elegance (and fewer corner cases that constantly explode in your face).

[_y5hn]

C++ is relatively easy to code in a plain way that don't blow up in your face. It's just that java made much more business sense with GC, stack trace, safe objects and built-in security model.

[dnautics]

> It is only with hindsight that we see how flawed these improvements were

I think some platforms existed that had already solved those issues, but it was a different time. Disseminating those ideas was harder, open source wasn't as much of a thing yet, so development was siloed, we didn't have blogs or youtube to aggregate and broadcast the danger of those footguns, and it was the evolutionary solution that did provide the most QOL improvements.