Stroustrup explicitly mentioned in his keynote at this year's CPPCON that 2016 that C++ has the ability to be low level and also provide higher abstractions so

Stroustrup explicitly mentioned in his keynote at this year's CPPCON that 2016 that C++ has the ability to be low level and also provide higher abstractions so you get away from thinking specifically about implementation details and more about ideas. I think that's the power of C++ (the fact you can do both), and without OOP would be useless.