For me I got the hints of something might go wrong with STL seeing more and more use, and then boost, various pointer types.. and it kept piling on. I'd say as soon as template metaprogramming became mainstream, in a language where it looked like a tumor, that was the end of it for me personally. It was not a language I knew anymore, nor cared about. C is a bit more verbose but concise enough to get around (if there's no abuse of pre-processor). With Rust, jury is still out there.