The reason why the charm of C++ wore off on me early on and why C is like my wife who I love more and more each year is that there's a lot of hidden "knowledge"

The reason why the charm of C++ wore off on me early on and why C is like my wife who I love more and more each year is that there's a lot of hidden "knowledge" in C++. The language is always playing a game of its own and a lot of your level of expertise depends on how well you've bothered to learn the rules of that game. For example, exceptions, as decribed in the article. Exceptions themselves make sense in some scope: they model some cases of error handling and controlled longjmping really well while are totally unsuited for other cases where a more fine-grained control of failure is necessary. Thus, exceptions themselves are applicable to an extent in a certain scope. However, in C++, the scope where exceptions actually do work is even more narrow than the scope where exceptions would generally fit. Like explained in the article, the FQA, and this thread, there are numerous pitfalls where exceptions totally break and a number of assumptions you have to make but can't guarantee. This reduces down to a few "known almost safe ways" of using them with a lot of "ifs" bundled in, and you need to explicitly know those ways. Unlike in C, in C++ you can't deduce what works and what doesn't out of merely reading or writing code: you have to have enough experience to know these pitfalls first hand so that you know how to avoid them and why. There's basically a line drawn in sand of what is known to work and what is not, like medical remedies in ancient cultures. And further, all this effort is only really needed to deal with the language itself. It's not required to solve the programming challenge at hand. It's something that is not needed with C because you can reason with C on a "what I see is what I have" basis.