Comparing C++ to the English Language

I was reading this article on Wikipedia
[ur]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Number_of_words_in_English[/utl]

And it got me thinking about how no English speaker anywhere could ever learn or use all of those words in a lifetime, and that the common speaker restricts themselves to around 10,000 words for everyday communication. English has thousands of rules, and tens of thousands of exceptions for every one. Upon reading a new word, you can't even pronounce it correctly, since English spelling is so divorced from the spoken word. Yet, English is the second most-used language in the world, trailing Mandarin by only a small margin, and twice as used as the third most-used language, Spanish.

It then dawned on me, that this is extremely similar to C++. People love to talk about how C++ is a horrible kludge of a language, smashing anything and everything into a huge ball of functionality, the entirety of which nobody could ever fully utilize. Yet, it is one of the most useful and widely-used programming languages in existence.

TL;DR: WE C++ NAO

>>1
It's true that there are a few hundred ridiculous exceptions that you have to memorize

I disagree. There are thousands upon thousands of words that you can't pronounce by spelling. Compound this by adding in word stress positions (which make the word sound completely wrong if not pronounced correctly) and words with identical spelling patterns but different pronunciations, and I would argue that almost every word in the English language is an 'exception'.