[tachyonbeam]

I agree. C++ offers a fairly good compromise between performance, low-level control and convenience. C++ strings and vectors, classes, make it much easier to implement a number of things in C++ than in C. The popularity of C++ is very much a matter of fitness for purpose.

You could write code in D or Nim, and your code might be marginally more readable, but you wouldn't have as many easily available libraries, or as much support (eg: stack overflow). It's hard to compete with the fairly good compromise that C++ offers.