But why do people insist on being able to do low and high level stuff in the same language? What's wrong with, say, using Python for high level stuff, and calling into C for low level tasks? C+Python is probably more convenient than C++.

I should have said "there is no other language which gives you the latitude for crafting high performance tools". You can indeed create serious high performance systems in a number of languages. The thing about most languages other than C and C++ is that things written in them tend to inherit their qualities - A system written in Java generally use Java's garbage collector. That works great for a number of things but it's still a constraint.

More of C++'s "modularization" features are optional than in the other languages so you have more latitude for creating your tools than anywhere else.

Of course, you do get the badness too...

Have you worked on it? Do you know this? Is it all written in Lisp, or are the parts that need high-performance and predictability written in C or C++?

There's a lot of language FUD out there. I say this as someone who owns OnLisp, and has spent a lot of time learning Lisp.

So, there are really only a couple of problems:

• if you're Zed Shaw, you apparently want to cut two wheels off an 18-wheeler, and if you're Zed Shaw, you're likely to screw up and choose the drive wheels for your demented sacrifice. You do that, the sucker won't even roll.

• the stupid hatas who judge the race won't acknowledge your achievement. Something about the allowed types of bicycle. Is that analogous to how you can't run Ruby on a microcontroller with 1024 bytes of RAM, maybe? Because you can sure as fuck run C++ on it.

Anyway, direct pointer manipulation has been part of OO environments since the beginning. The purest current incarnation might be SqueakNOS (ever seen an IDE driver written in Smalltalk?) or SBCL's alien, but the most practical one is probably C++. Rust, Golang, and ATS seem like up-and-coming contenders.

Edit: oh, I forgot D. D's been an up-and-coming contender for more than ten years now.

Anyway, C++ is more like a construction system which can be used to make a bicycle, a semi, or a six-person tandem which could win the Tour De France.

Which is to say it's pretty clunky for a lot of things. But there are still things where both large scale organization and particular low-calls need to coexist - Databases, large graphics programs, etc. It's not impossible to write these in C or Java obviously but I'd still say C++ is cleaner.

I often use a paraphrase of the Winston Churchill quote as well. There are probably many better languages for many other applications, however for high performance, cross platform large scale apps C++ is still the only game in town.

Joe's point that all the complexities have reasons behind them is a really good one. I'd suggest reading Stroustrup's "The Design and Evolution of C++" for more information.

I wish that D1 was oficially killed, and a stable strict subset of D2 ("D1.5") was chosen as a recommended future-proof version.

In C++, you don't have to declare a single class or create a single template.