[rjberry]

Not that it particularly matters whether we're talking about C++, as it's rather tangential, the original essay by Richard P. Gabriel that coined the term "Worse is Better" talks about C++ (http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html):

  The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++.

In his later essay on the same topic (http://dreamsongs.com/Files/IsWorseReallyBetter.pdf) he again talks about C++:

   In the computer world, the example of interest to JOOP readers is C++. Many would concede that languages like Smalltalk, Eiffel, and CLOS are vastly “better" in some sense than C++, but, because of its worse-is-better characteristics, the fortunes of object-oriented programming probably lie with C++.

Simplicity is more often simplicity of implementation than interface. Anyone who's worked with the C standard library knows that it's anything but simple. There's a lot of incidental complexity that is due to design inconsistencies. The complex parts of a language like Haskell are the bits where the ideas themselves are complicated, but the power you get for overcoming that initial learning curve is very great.