I've been a C++ user since 'cfront' and he simply has a point. If Stroustrup had been a little bit more disciplined about what features to add and which to leave out C++ would have been much more manageable. I'm not really afraid of many things but legacy C++ codebases I try very hard to stay away from. With some luck the original author(s) went overboard with all of the stuff that's available and never got around to refactoring any of it.