The fact C++ has so many ways of defining things is not the reason it's so popular. The reason is the enormous industry investment on the language tooling and ecosystem. IMO the language itself is the worst part of the ecosystem, but the other parts create a totality that is the best development language ecosystem in industry for my niche (graphics and geometry) including libraries, copmpilers, debugger & profiling etc.
Any language with the level of industrial support C++ has had would have grown to prominence. C++ came abut a judicious time in history when "object orientation" was becoming the latest buzzword. And now we have ended up with gazillions of lines of C++ code.
It's a tragedy of our trade that two mongrels - C++ and Javascript - became to be among the most prominent in our trade.
But the reason C++ fits in so many industries from embedded system to high level gui libraries is its flexibility we see the end of OOP trend but C++ does bot lock its users into one paradigm or another so it will continue to be industry standard. Even if the industry is moving towards other paradigms of programing.
Adding, javascript really inly has one industry its used in. Think it sais a bit about its versatility
Any language with the level of industrial support C++ has had would have grown to prominence. C++ came abut a judicious time in history when "object orientation" was becoming the latest buzzword. And now we have ended up with gazillions of lines of C++ code.
It's a tragedy of our trade that two mongrels - C++ and Javascript - became to be among the most prominent in our trade.