C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)
The bullet list near the end closely matches my own experience with C++. There's an inordinate number of features creating an even worse profusion of edge cases where they interact. Then the "solutions" for those edge cases usually add even more complexity. Worse, they force programmers to coddle their compilers. The ratio between what a C++ compiler will accept and what it will produce sane code for is <i>huge</i>. That's why every C++ codebase I've ever seen is full of code to do things that shouldn't be necessary, and goes through all sorts of contortions to avoid doing things that should be OK, lest the compiler spew out an un-debuggable mess.<p>I'm perfectly happy managing my own complexity in C, or avoiding it entirely in Python. C++, on the other hand, seems to have been designed by compiler writers for their own enjoyment and/or job security. Every other "systems programming language" from D to Objective-C to Go to Rust to Nim presents a more coherent face to the programmer.