If we were discussing two languages Strawberry and Kiwi, and I had a large, established codebase in Strawberry and a bunch of programmers who are experts in Str

If we were discussing two languages Strawberry and Kiwi, and I had a large, established codebase in Strawberry and a bunch of programmers who are experts in Strawberry, it would be a hard sell to get me to switch to Kiwi even if Kiwi were better than Strawberry in every conceivable way and backwards compatible with it to boot: - Learning to use a new system effectively takes time and energy. Are you 100% sure that the benefit of the new system is great enough to offset these costs? - Hybrid codebases have higher maintenance costs than homogeneous ones. If Kiwi mixes with Strawberry seamlessly, maybe that burden is lower—but the more true that is, the harder it is to believe that moving to Kiwi confers a large advantage. In this specific case, I could believe that C++ by seasoned C++ users leads to demonstrable net gains. But it's easier for me to believe that switching to Rust or Haskell would confer higher gains, corresponding to the higher risk and higher cost of switching. So I think it's not that people are irrational about avoiding C++. I think that C++ is in an awkward place on the hill between C and things better than C++. If you need something better, you will go to something with better tradeoffs than C++; if you don't need something better, you just live with your existing C codebase.