That's a very cheap way to dismiss C++. I think it's more that Stroustroup has the ability to develop a decent language, promote it, make it usable for real-world use and improve it long term. I would say Linus is in the same category. Despite all his antics he knows how to push a project forward while still keeping his old users. Both have a very good combination of vision and pragmatism.

While I agree with you, and enjoy following Bjarne, the rise of VMs and scripting languages helped keeping C++ around.

Had Java and .NET do the proper thing, by following up on Oberon, Modula-3 and Eiffel, by having proper AOT compilation since day one, and on Java's case value types as well, developers would feel less pressured to turn to C and C++.

Basically if they had been released the same way Go was.

OP's remark was a sarcasm.

Really? I guess I have heard this too often said seriously to detect sarcasm there.