Great article! As a former C++ programmer, I often watch with nostalgia the slow evolution of the language and with some irony the emergence and evolution of other languages who purport to be simpler and more efficient to program with, but end up with just as much complexity albeit of a different kind. As I remember, one of the biggest problems with C++ is that linkage wasn’t part of the specification, which makes it very hard to have a robust flexible dynamic linking mechanism. And of course the terribly long compile times.