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

>>6
That's a backwards compatibility problem, not a design problem. Old words were written down a thousand years ago and everyone got used to spelling them one way, and then the pronunciation changed and we didn't fix the spellings. A few spelling changes did happen before England went mad with power and started colonizing the whole world, but they were completely stupid changes that made stuff look more like French (mise -> mice, fisc -> fish) or Dutch (cniht -> knight) instead of actually fixing shit.

This is also why we write vowels differently from the rest of the world.