[qalmakka]

The desire of maintaining compatibility with C at all cost is both the main selling point of C++ and the source of almost all of its madness. C was full of weird quirks (null terminated strings, enums that decayed to int, char* that could represent arbitrary data, weird syntax inherited from B, nonsensical arrays, ...) but its simplicity has always kinda kept everything down to a tameable level of chaos.

C++ took this quirky base and pushed it (abused it?) in ways that go way beyond what can be considered "sane"; see for instance the bajillion ways operator new() can be redefined, the fact there are at least 10 ways to initialize something, or the fact that features can be _discovered_ and not designed (like CRTP). Still, this wealth of features together with the unwavering (and arguably masochistic) Herculean efforts of the ISO C++ committee to modernize the language make it, by far, one of the most flexible languages around. Every single time I use C++ I discover a new amazing way to do something that had never crossed my mind; call me crazy, but I think this makes programming fun, a detail that is often (wrongly) neglected.