C-Based languages

C is an amazingly designed language.  It's beautiful, simple, elegant and fast.
Everything a well designed programming language should be.

C++ then came along and shit all over Dennis Ritchie's masterpiece.  Bjarne took a beautiful, simple, elegant and fast language. And kept shitting on it until all that was left was 'fast'.  Dennis should of beat the shit out of him for turning his work of art into an abomination.

Then Gosling came along, surveyed the turd that Bjarne had dropped, and attempted to clean it up.    He redesigned C++ to remove the crap and attain the elegance that C had.  Unfortunately, in his cleaning frenzy, he over-simplified the language and sacrificed speed.  In the name of simplicity he removed pointers, manual memory management,  generics, operator overloading and native code compilation.  A noble effort, but ultimately just as much of a failure as C++.

If you understand the principles behind the design of C++ then you will see that it is simply an embodiment of the same concepts that have been done in C, only with more convenience. Almost all the new features in C++ map directly to C equivalents. You are not obligated to use every single feature, but should only use the ones that make sense in the current situation. While it is true that many overuse these features and create "executable bloat" as a result, that is not the fault of the language but the user.

"There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses." - Bjarne Stroupstrup