One of the big differences is that Java and Go have straightforward context-free grammars, mostly, and you can whip up a working parser in no time. C++ is a bit of a beast, by comparison (hence keywords like “typename”).

C++ also has the complex overloads and template system. I think people underestimate how complex these things are when they are learning C++, and how complex their interactions are. Then there’s the preprocessor.

You can kind of argue that these are just an accumulation of changes, but other languages contemporary with C and C++ do not suffer from these complexities, so the argument falls flat. By comparison, Go and Java rely on reflection or code generation more, and these are a bit simpler.

And then there is arcane stuff like this:

* https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/eval_order

* https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/copy_elision

That does make the language feel very complex even without the whole templates depth.