C++ advocate here. It doesn't seem to be a strongly represented opinion here, so I think it's actually worth me chiming in. All the criticisms are valid. Yes,

C++ advocate here. It doesn't seem to be a strongly represented opinion here, so I think it's actually worth me chiming in. All the criticisms are valid. Yes, C++ is like "making an octopus by nailing 4 extra legs onto a dog". None of us like having to remember that we need virtual destructors if we have derived classes, because otherwise deleting a class through the wrong derived pointer type would cause complicated problems. There's a bunch of crap there. But I spent years coding C and I hate going back. I miss smart pointers when I'm stuck with C. I miss containers that don't suck. I miss lame stuff like log4cpp and boost::asio. If you're willing to accept a bunch of dependencies and can handle serious (sometimes grevious) conceptual overheads, you can write native code with an expressiveness approaching Python. To me, that makes it all worth it.