Well, there's not a lot of room for problems to crop up when all one can do is define classes :) Still, here's a few for you: the design of Cloneable is consid

Well, there's not a lot of room for problems to crop up when all one can do is define classes :) Still, here's a few for you: the design of Cloneable is considered to be a mistake, as are exception specifications. These have real negative consequences. File IO was laughably bad and completely unintuitive needing several classes for the simplest of tasks (perhaps this was fixed more recently, but funny you should mention streams). Resource management was quite tricky to get right before try-with-resources and it still is if one wants performance. Memory leaks and resource leaks are still possible. Boxing and unboxing. The particularly weak type-erased generics. Java's saving grace is that it's a very programmer-friendly language. No matter how much one screws up, the worst that's probably gonna happen is a null pointer exception with a nicely formatted stack trace attached. The tooling is top class. All of this means that anybody with a pulse can program in Java and get a mostly working program. It won't be a joy to use, unless one is particularly impressed by classes, methods, interfaces in abundance, class hierarchies and factories. C++ is not like that. If one doesn't use the safer modern idioms and makes a mistake it will crash (if lucky),or act in weird ways or corrupt something. Sometimes there is no way to avoid dangerous code. There is no nice stack trace, you have to work for it. Probably have to stare at assembly and work with a fully featured but thoroughly painful to use command line debugger that's twice as old as Java. But it's powerful and really fast. It lets one design creatively, because it supports more abstraction possibilities. And it's not owned by any corporation, it's an international standard that runs on most platforms. I understand why people use Java. I use C++ because it's not just a tool that gets the job done, but also a way to challenge myself to make something that requires attention and skill. If I want to, it's me and the machine without framewerks, factories, fancy IDEs, dependency injection, package managers and virtual machines.