Being well familiar with C++ I can never see a clear reason to prefer something like Java. I also much prefer C++ as a language but garbage collection is such

Being well familiar with C++ I can never see a clear reason to prefer something like Java. I also much prefer C++ as a language but garbage collection is such a huge productivity win that I'll always use a GC'd language if it's appropriate. No matter how cleverly you abstract manual memory management away in C++ it's still a real chore and a source of bugs.