And maybe it was 5/10 years earlier? Not sure. My uni days were the very early 1980s. Our university literally still made 1st years use marked sense (not even punch) cards.

I never ever liked C++, it always seemed to be tacked on to the side of C (literally at the start).

I liked the "better C" bits, but the "++" bits and the magic under the covers and then later the added layer of templates just seemed ridiculously complicated especially because we were still in the days of inheritance and "is-a" instead of "has-a" objects.

I loathed all the overloading that suddenly << meant something completely different when doing I/O and weird multiple function definitions to provide the generics.

Much preferred the Objective C idea of messages, was much more what I understood OOP to be after Smalltalk.

But by then I'd made the leap to being an "architect" and got to pontificate from on high and languages became semi-irrelevant.