I am currently on a team maintaining a giant codebase and migrating to C++11 (and beyond) for a new compiler. We do not have issues with the deprecation of auto_ptr, the use of raw pointers or general debugging COM problems. The code base is 20 years old and we do not complain to debug it.
Debugging pointers seems a poor reason to criticize an entire language!
C++ may be complicated but the English language is also complicated; just because people tend to use a smaller vocabulary than others doesn't make the language irrelevant or worthless.
Looking at how English has been used to create a raft of rich and diverse poetry, plays, prose and literature in general, the same should be applied to C++ because the unique use of it in a variety of varying circumstances surely is its beauty.
> Looking at how English has been used to create a raft of rich and diverse poetry, plays, prose and literature in general, the same should be applied to C++ because the unique use of it in a variety of varying circumstances surely is its beauty.
I don't think this is a valid argument, though. Natural languages have to be rich. Programming languages should be terse and concise because we have to keep most of them in our heads at one time and our brain capacity is limited. You don't need to know all of English/French/Romanian but you kind of need to know all of C++/Python/Javascript to do your job well when developing C++/Python/Javascript.
I think the C++ designers lately kind of agree with me but the backward compatibility requirements are really stringent and they can't just deprecate a lot of the older features.
That was obviously (I hope?) just one example. C++ has a huge set of overlapping features, some of which have been introduced as a better alternative of older features. Their interaction is extremely complex. It's great that your team manages to steer a large, old codebase without trouble, but most of the ones I've seen can't, and this complexity is part of why they can't.
Looking at contrieved legal texts, which is a better comparison with code than poetry, I don't agree. I don't even agree that there would be the english language.
Legalese uses a ton of latin ididoms, arcane rights and philosophies. This is comparable to the cruft of C or C++ standards. For a microkernel of some thousand LOC you shouldn't need a multi-paradigm language.
seL4 did it in Haskel, which is a step in the right direction. Then it was ported to a provably safe subset of C.
Debugging pointers seems a poor reason to criticize an entire language!
C++ may be complicated but the English language is also complicated; just because people tend to use a smaller vocabulary than others doesn't make the language irrelevant or worthless.
Looking at how English has been used to create a raft of rich and diverse poetry, plays, prose and literature in general, the same should be applied to C++ because the unique use of it in a variety of varying circumstances surely is its beauty.