It doesn't feel to me like much of C++'s complexity is just "the complexity of reality" being faithfully exposed. I'd wonder whether that's just me being dim,

It doesn't feel to me like much of C++'s complexity is just "the complexity of reality" being faithfully exposed. I'd wonder whether that's just me being dim, but if so then I think Bjarne Stroustrup and Herb Sutter are dim in the same way. (Stroustrup, quoted approvingly by Sutter: "Inside C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out." and "Say 10% of the size of C++ in definition and similar in front-end compiler size. ... most of the simplification would come from generalization.") And it doesn't seem likely to me that they are ignorantly overpessimistic about the complexity of C++.