If only there were alternatives which give similar control.
There's not. We are stuck in a C/C++ world for the time being. I had hopes for something like Oberon or D a couple of decades ago, but no one wants to go tilting at the windmills.
Shameless plug, but Rust is intended to be that. There's also Clay, etc.
I do believe most new projects today would be better off with a combination of a
high level language for the logic, like Python or Perl, and a low level language
like C or maybe Go for the plumbing, with clean interfaces between them. There
really is no need for a behemoth like C++, with two dozen ways to do any
single thing, half of them conflicting with each other and the other half
subject to vigorous religious debates.
I think the key for effective use of C++ is to know what to do and what to use to do it. It's certain that relying on multiple inheritance for example is probably a bad idea.
After working with Ruby for some time, I realized that many co-developers don't have a slightest of a clue what they're doing with the language yet they do just about right with it - with C++ similar (careless) mindset and skill level would very soon end up in a terminated project.
In the end it's the domain which matters more than the languages - as I implied in my earlier comment, I outright require as much control over the hardware as possible - there are no alternatives for me. Rust comes close(and it's nice, I like it thus far!), but let's see in a few years.
I just wish/hope it's true... that we
ll finally get out of this dark age of byzantine languages that grow like cancer (just rembered the good ol
"C is to C++ as Lung is to Lung Cancer" :) )... congrats for saying it out loud anyway!
Why are you doing this? C++ has no future, only past.