C++ is awesome, but I kinda went the other way with my stuff for more flexibility. JavaScript as the main programming language and C++ only for the performance and driver access bottlenecks. (More info: http://multiplay.io)
These days, I'd much prefer seeing C fill such a perf-specific role. I can't stand C++, and I've read through some massive, and what most people would call "well written" code bases in C++. Every one is its own world of WTFs with abuse of templates and operator overloading and weird RAII and scoping strategies. I can never read code in C++ and really understand what's going on until I've made a cursory pass, identified everything that semantically changes the meaning of the code and internalized that. That's incredibly frustrating considering readability is paramount in really any project, but especially when the code base is tens of thousands of lines. And given that I've never seen a real world example where these features have actually provided any benefit other than terseness, I can't understand why anyone would ever use them.
Outside of the IOCCC, I haven't had trouble reading C except things that abuse the preprocessor, and that's frowned upon. So why not C?
The Pascal community was most vocal in the 1980s and 1990s, but has since dwindled in size. Today, it's often the Ruby community that's most vocal, and they are often very loud, indeed.
Curiously, we don't really see this attitude from the Python community nearly as much as one would expect. I'm not completely sure why this is, but it may be due to many Python developers having extensive knowledge of C and the various languages influenced syntactically by C (C++, Java, C#, Objective-C, and so forth). Due to their breadth of knowledge, different syntaxes just aren't an issue worth getting upset about.
Some of those people are the ones who are responsible for (unjustifiably, in my opinion) giving the C-style syntax a bad reputation by expressing their dislike for it.
And, yes, the Pascal, Ruby and Python communities, among many others, do exist. They do have very different traits and attitudes. You're free to pretend that they don't exist, but the reality is that they do.
Using node (or the v8 shell directly) javascript is competitive with python or perl for most common scripting tasks
I think my favorite least-known thing about writing simple tools for Windows during my time as a sys admin was HTAs. You had full jscript COM access with a web page presentation that's packaged into something that you can run without opening a browser explicitly. It was awesome building full web applications that could do pretty much any administrative task on Windows.
Well they are all three terribly designed languages, but JS is way faster and probably more secure: It's battle tested in environments where the assumption is that the attacker controls the code being executed, which is normally not the case on the server side. On the other hand, JS does not have anything like perl's tainted strings, which are a great security feature IMO.