No language is perfect. But surely you'd agree that there is a spectrum here. In C++ you have to think "should this be a pointer or a reference" all the time. In most modern languages, you never do. And although there are clear methods to write C++ well, it is rightly criticized for being overly complex and unintuitive. For example, std::set is ordered. That's a basic mismatch with expectations. Sure, you can just check the docs. But how much code would be more efficient if they had just spent a bit of time making things easier to work with?