I take the point about "Java's designers were consciously designing a product for people not as smart as them." But, consider the reverse - The C++ spec always

I take the point about "Java's designers were consciously designing a product for people not as smart as them." But, consider the reverse - The C++ spec always seemed to as if the language designers were showing off - competing to add fatures that showed off how clever they were, without as much regard for the readability and maintainablity of the resulting code in the language. I don't think that strategy is optimal either. Also, if you think only simple code can be done in C#, have a look at the Rx framework. C# as a language is suffering from a bit of bloat too, but not as bad as C++.