I agree, C++ is very versatile in terms of supporting both low-level and high-level coding styles, and the fine-grained interleaving of the two. There is indeed

I agree, C++ is very versatile in terms of supporting both low-level and high-level coding styles, and the fine-grained interleaving of the two. There is indeed a ridiculous, and probably unnecessary, amount of complexity available in the language, but if you're writing new code there's no problem with sticking to a reasonable subset and ignoring the esoteric stuff. Of course you may not be able to avoid it if you have to deal with other people's code. But I find it notable that the concern is still productivity versus performance. In this day and age shouldn't security and correctness have attained at least equal priority? I mean we still live in a world where every single year, every major web browser has at least one new critical "remote code execution" vulnerability reported. I think one thing that's being missed wrt the advent of C++11 is that it is now practical, when appropriate, to write memory safe C++ code that can be compared apples-to-apples with other modern languages. And outperform them. Except for maybe Rust. Maybe. shameless plug for those interested in memory safe C++ programming: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1093894/How-To-Safely-Pass-Parameters-By-Reference-in-Cplu http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1093894/How-To-Safely-Pa...