But I seem to remember watching a talk by Kate Gregory in the last few weeks where her main point is that you really need to have a full understanding of the language to program in it. So if C++ has baroque complexity that is shunned by best practices you still need to be aware of it. I know the C++ folks would like to escape their past but there just isn't a good way to do that, short of a clean break with backwards compatibility.
I bet they could actually pull off a break with old code if they would release tools, ala Abseil, which took care of migration for you. I think it's reasonable to accept that legacy code needs to be freshened up every so often to allow the language to evolve. We have Google translate for human languages, why don't we have it for code? It seems like a far easier task.
