It's not just my opinion. Do I have to resort to the nuclear option? http://www.yosefk.com/c++fqa/ Well, there you have it. C++11 and 14 made some things better, but they also have their problems.

My opinions have different strengths. This one has accumulated enough evidence that I no longer consider the possibility of its falsehood. C++ sucks, and that's the end of it. I know of the gazillion eminently reasonable reasons why C++ is what it is, but it still sucks. I know that if Stroustrup made cleaner choices for the language, it wouldn't be so popular, but it still sucks. I know that a better language that nobody use is… well… useless, but C++ still sucks. In my opinion, C++ is one of our greatest shame as a community.

> If you allow yourself to cherry-pick criteria then you can make any language be the optimal choice.

I don't cherry pick. I'm just comparing languages. Not external tools. Not backward compatibility. Not programmer availability. Just languages. The other criteria are short term considerations, and greatly increase status-quo bias. They're only interesting when I must do a small project now, with whoever happen to work with me at the moment.

For bigger projects however, the language is increasingly important. The bigger the project, the more reasonable it is to switch to use a better language, instead of a better known language.