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C++ is meant as an advancement of C. And it's used as one. Dmd was written in C++ until version 2.069, and countless other programs, both open and closed source still use it. It makes sense - it's a superset of C (well, almost), so one can always fall back to C features when the more complex features of C++ don't justify themselves.
Yet, many of the most well-known and successful programmers don't see it like that. Can it be that C++ is so complex that even conservative use of it makes your codebase so unreadable that even the archaic C is a better choice? Think how crazy this is - the cream of of our profession resort to pointer / length pairs over std::vector, and copy-pasting the module name to every public declaration over using namespaces.
There has to be HUGE downsides in C++ for this competent people to resort to this drastic avoidance. They do say what the downsides of C++ are about: too big a language to learn well, so code ends up using features the reader does not know. Still, if this is the case one would think it had been long since generally aknowledged: C++ guidebooks would tell to avoid less-known language features absent strong reasons, and later languages ought to have more pressure to be more minimalist like Go and less "CISC" like D or Rust. Yet, complex D features like ranges (okay, more of a Phobos feature), operator overloading, CTFE, objects and templates don't seem to be commonly hated.
This inconsistency in our attitude towards language complexity is interesting in my opinion. I want to hear your opinions, would you rather use C or C++ in your job if you had to pick one ("it depends"-answers okay). But most importantly, why? What do you make of that C++ complexity seems to be so appreciated and so at contempt at the same time?
