Anti-C++ Hipsters

People who hate C++ are only doing so because it's hip and cool to hate on something that seems too complex at first glance. You want to be seen as cool and edgy, as someone who goes against the grain, when in reality you're just another annoying undergraduate that will probably have a hard time finding a job in the field.

C++ is not perfect, but no language is. Get over it.

The following statement that you made also irks me..

if you can change and repurpose variables willy nilly that pretty much throws the advantages of type safety out the window.

Geeze, have you ever written a single line of code in your entire life? Just curious, because at Kodak, we have several pieces of production level C code that has the following patterrn...

int lock = 1;
/* Do some stuff */
  {
    int lock = 0;
    /* Do some more stuff */
  }