Spot on, and a far better critique than Zed Shaws rant, that boils down to 'I dislike the syntax' mostly. Many things are done nicely in C++, and C++ provides f

Spot on, and a far better critique than Zed Shaws rant, that boils down to 'I dislike the syntax' mostly. Many things are done nicely in C++, and C++ provides far better abstractions than C. However, since new language construct have been stacked on C++ for almost 30 years, the language became huge, as well as the possible interactions between language constructs. The result is that you will rarely find programmers that understand C++ fully. I have seen a lot of awful code that uses C++ as C with classes, badly. Usually, classes and functions have been written with so little understanding of encapsulation that refactoring is painful. And for properly written C++ programs and libraries, it's usually hard to find people to maintain/modify it. On the other hand, it is also hard to find good ML/Haskell/whatever programmers. And lots of people get away with writing ugly Python or Ruby code.