I consciously avoided C++ since the late 90s, lest its litany of accidental complexities crowd other more important things out of my brain. I was drawn into it

I consciously avoided C++ since the late 90s, lest its litany of accidental complexities crowd other more important things out of my brain. I was drawn into it recently by a work assignment, and have been pleasantly surprised by modern C++. I find it much more pleasant to write, e.g., ODBC client code in C++ than in C, and templates have a lot to do with that. I'm not an expert with Lisp macros or other reportedly superior meta-languages, but I will say that when I write generic code in C# or Java, I really miss the power of C++ templates. Template syntax is pretty awful, and accomplishing what I want can involve some really strange idioms, like SFINAE. The ergonomics are slowly improving with type deduction, constexpr, and now concepts.