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The comparison with Perl is apt, to my mind. Both Perl and C++ were early to their space, experimenting with concepts that were weird at the time, trying many approaches we now find ugly, and serving as examples of both successes and failures for the much better languages that came after them. The difference is that Perl5 stopped evolving some time ago, while C++ continues the same tendency unabashed.

(Scala is another example of such a language.)

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Are you suggesting that reflection is a new fancy thing and c++ is paving the way?

No; OOP, metaprogramming, exceptions, etc were sort of new in early 1990s in an efficiently compiled language, so C++ was paving its part of way, in an awkward manner, trying hard to make abstractions zero-cost. (I mean mainstream; Common Lisp had all these for a long time, and in an elegant way, but the cost is non-zero.)

Equally, Perl explicitly tried a number of syntactic ways to do something; some stuck as good ideas, some were demonstrated to be... less good. I think it was important to explore and show that a particular approach has serious downsides in practice, but it's not necessary to stick to in once better alternatives are available.

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