Mentioning the job security factor of C in a C++ discussion is ... quite bold.
On average, C++ has the highest (talk + best practices + monstrous refactoring) / (actual code) ratio of any language I know.
The C++ projects I worked on moved at a glacial pace, with constant discussions about the best object hierarchy, patches because some compiler had a different interpretation of the 100+ nested templates than some other compiler, and so on.
I write and have written exclusively C++11 and C++14. I have not written legacy C++, nor do I have a cause to do so (though I have had to wrap around that code at times). The C++11 and C++14 code that I see is generally clean, adheres to straightforward memory models (heavy use of references and smart pointers), and has pretty straightforward and comprehensible OOP design.
There are developers who assert that C++11 is a step change of a language from C++98, and that may be true, but reasonably written, stdlib-adhering C++11 and C++14 are solid, hard-to-break languages in the general case and horror stories with regards to C++98 seem curious unless one wants to bring up failures of early DHTML applications in conversations about React.
(The build environments? Often a different story.)
> I write and have written exclusively C++11 and C++14.
I am skeptic of what this sentence is supposed to mean. Well, except that you've programmed in C++ for a very short period of time, in what seems like a very particular environment.
As far as I'm concerned. C++11 and C++14 came out with no design guidelines, zero different way to organize the code, no coding guidelines, no good practises. Just like C++03 before it :D
> I am skeptic of what this sentence is supposed to mean. Well, except that you've programmed in C++ for a very short period of time, in what seems like a very particular environment.
By choice. I use C++ where I absolutely must and nowhere else. It exists for particular use cases and no others. If I need high-performance native code with a strong(-enough) type system and I can't use Rust, I will use C++. Why would I use it elsewhere?
I have been using C++ for about five years, which by some lights is a short period of time--but, then, I've also been programming for twenty and I can comfortably say that I understand the hows and whys of C++ as a language even if I don't practice it heavily. (I learned them even before I used C++ at all because they reveal the particulars of the underlying techniques used by other programming environments, such as the JVM.)
And C++11 and later is pretty easily made straightforward, comprehensible, and manageable. (I mean, if you only stuck to the axioms of "never pass a pointer" and "always use std::unique_ptr and std::shared_ptr" you'll have code that's leaps and bounds past C++98/03 or anything written in C.) I write it in such a style and the code I'm exposed to generally does, too. Sorry that you don't?
On average, C++ has the highest (talk + best practices + monstrous refactoring) / (actual code) ratio of any language I know.
The C++ projects I worked on moved at a glacial pace, with constant discussions about the best object hierarchy, patches because some compiler had a different interpretation of the 100+ nested templates than some other compiler, and so on.
Oh, and the code also segfaulted and was buggy.