I've written and shipped plenty of software with modern C++. Ownership and move semantics mean that after writing a few helper and utility functions, things go pretty smoothly. The most concise and direct software I've written has all been in C++. I can organize and transform data directly instead of jumping through hoops or suffering from enormous amounts of overhead and indirection in a scripting language.

Not to mention I can create stand alone executables that have no dependencies and wind up smaller than most scripting language's interpreters for entire openGL based programs with GUIs.

One thing that doesn't often seem to get considered here is what your user wishes you wrote it in. I don't want my software to come as an assortment of scripts that depend on interpreters that themselves might have dependencies. One file is all it has to be.

There are plenty of directly compiled languages with good performance, linking to C APIs, and higher level abstractions.

Rust, Haskell, Go, and Erlang come to mind.

I am not confusing verbosity with complexity and I have written all kinds of C++ software over a career of 15 years ranging from legacy core banking systems to hardware drivers. In fact, the simple C++ code often tends to be verbose.

When you are writing complex software, you are bound to get things wrong in any language, not just C++.

What I am arguing for is that C++ code need not be complex even if the C++ language itself is complex or the software is complex.

If you have an argument against this, please make it substantiatively without resorting to insinuation about the kind of work I do or not do.

I apologize if i sounded condescending, and coming from a BFSI background myself, it was such a relief to write software systems in Java after years of C++. I agree "C++ code need not be complex", but the language itself is so designed that most often than not, you end up heading down a slippery slope.