[ramchip]

I found that the space of "appropriate" problems for C++ had shrunk to almost nothing. As a fairly low-level programmer (data acquisition, signal/image processing), this isn't quite my experience. I've found that a mix of simple C-style code for the layers that directly interact with the material, with higher-level layers such as the GUI implemented in the usual C++, makes for a very decent mix, and certainly a better one than plain C.

I could also keep the systems stuff in C functions and use an FFI to call them, but I've never found a language that enabled me to write GUIs more easily than with plain old C++ and Qt. Java (or Java from Clojure) is slow and ugly as sin, and most other languages either use bindings to C/C++ libraries or have incomplete, mostly unsupported kits. C# and family is perhaps an exception, but not very portable.