Very true, and that's why newer languages are designed to limit the amount of damage average programmers can cause, while maintaining the same level of performa

Very true, and that's why newer languages are designed to limit the amount of damage average programmers can cause, while maintaining the same level of performance. See Rust for example. Sorry, small rant incoming. Ignore at will! I would still argue that good C++ programmers are exceptionally rare. I've worked with C++ professionally for roughly a decade (and as a hobby for many years before that), and despite using it and reading about it and fighting it and reasoning with it, I still don't consider myself a good C++ programmer. I've met several self-proclaimed good C++ programmers, but I've only ever met one I'd genuinely call good. He had experience in a dozen languages, half of them functional, and he produced code that was concise, maintainable, fast, documented, with correct pre- and post-conditions. Perhaps the best part was that he created interfaces that were a joy to use and very hard to misuse. He didn't like C++, but he knew how to make it work anyway. It was a joy to work with him. Contrast with your average C++ programmer who will overuse templates (hey, it's generic), generate a deep class hierarchy (hey, it's object oriented), of course with tons of setters and mutable state (parallelism? isn't that like std::thread and stuff?) and then waste time micro-optimizing anyway (hey, C++ is fast). Bonus points for avoiding the STL because "the STL is slow" (== game programmer, although this is becoming less common nowadays). Extra bonus points for arguing that GCs are slow, and then littering the code std::shared_pointer everywhere. These days, I go as far as to say that anyone who only has C++ in his toolbelt is not a particularly good C++ programmer, simply because of the lack of perspective.