There is this wonderful presentation by Herb Sutter talking about how the C++ concept “class” covers over 20 other abstractions, and that Bjarne’s choice for C+

There is this wonderful presentation by Herb Sutter talking about how the C++ concept “class” covers over 20 other abstractions, and that Bjarne’s choice for C++ was the right choice since it offers so much power and flexibility and expressive power in a concise abstraction. Other languages (just like the article) only saw the downsides to such a generic abstraction that they added N times more abstractions (so split inheritance, interfaces, traits, etc) and rules for interactions that it significantly complicated the language with fundamentally no effective gains. In summary, Herb will always do a better job than me explaining why the choices in the design of C++ classes, even with multiple inheritance, is one of the key factors of C++ success. With cppfront, he extends this idea with metaclasses to clearly describe intent. I think he is on the right track.