I'd say both. C++ is so insanely complicated at times with the various things you mention. And every release it just seems to get worse, because while "nice to

I'd say both. C++ is so insanely complicated at times with the various things you mention. And every release it just seems to get worse, because while "nice to have features" are added, the old stuff doesn't go away, and the syntactic gymnastics they have to go through to get it all to coexist are the programming language to who's on first. But the stack of stuff it takes you supposedly need to get stuff to compile is often insane. On one project I demonstrated that just find . | grep ".c$" | xargs gcc ... and a final link ran significantly faster than the mass of recursive nested/fake/etc makefiles that were supposed to speed up the compiles by doing dependency computations. I remember showing someone the basic "we turn the .c files into .o files, and then we make a second pass to link 'em" and they were like "really? that's all there is to compiling a C program?" The real straw for me when I was contributing to the Cairo project was recognizing I was going to have understand this stuff more, and so I sat down and read the Make manual: 16 chapters. Now I need to understand Automake, read the manual: 26 chapters. And then Autoconf: 21 chapters. It was like it was just spinning bigger and bigger.