Yes type inference is harder with C++'s language design (OO comes to mind as a particular problem), thus my claim that it's the wrong foundation to build on. Of course, people like challenging problems and are working to bring more type inference to OO languages [1].

Furthermore, I assert that this truly is the wrong foundation. For new projects that must have OO, Scala provides local type inference and object orientation. If you're really hurting for some manual memory management, look at Rust [3] or Habit [2].

If we can recover the features we love on a new foundation that provides new features like type inference or memory-safety, then we've found a better foundation, IMHO.

[1] http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~palsberg/typeflow.html

[2] http://hasp.cs.pdx.edu/habit-report-Nov2010.pdf

[3] http://www.rust-lang.org/