Haskell is way more consistent for me, it's easier to understand and debug if comparing it to a template heavy C++ code.
True, but it's become a specialist need - like construction machinery and heavy trucks. I wrote some C++ a few years ago (objects, STL, etc.) in a case where it had been chosen mostly out of inertia - Python could have been used with similar performance and less code (and did get used afterwards for other cases).
Speaking of Python and C++: possibly some of us would wish to write Python and get C++. Mark Dufour has been persistently plugging away at a Python-to-C++ compiler (and welcomes help): http://shed-skin.blogspot.com/
If you avoid web programming and SQL-heavy enterprise development C++ is very much mainstream and wouldn't call it a specialist need. Actually, the kind of open source projects I enjoy to tinker with [when not at work] is all C/C++: Qt, Webkit, SQLite, various compilers and interpreters, search engines, etc.
SQLite is written in C.
Excellent taste in tinkering, but ... ahem ... aren't those a tad on the infrastructure side ? ("Is this the right room for an argument ?", or are you setting a subtle trap ? ;-)
I don't doubt that most of the (non-idle, non-phone/TV/etc.) CPU cycles in the world are probably being burned by executing code written in C/C++. But the stuff in my shopping bag probably also did better than 90% of its movement by truck/train/ship.
P.S. Mark Dufour's ShedSkin may have you covered for 100x of that 200x speed hit you mentioned in another thread: http://www.hxa.name/minilight/#comparison is instructive (one small case, restricted, etc. Void where prohibited by law).
I'd say that for some it makes sense. Updated C++ will be a fairly high-level language with absolute access to bare metal and near 100% compatibility with C, that's very unique. And the world is in a desperate need for a deterministic (i.e. optionally garbage-collected) bare-metal replacement for C for systems programming. D could be it, but Walter just won't let the community to have some control of it.
Moreover, I suspect some of these improvements around the type system will allow C++ compilers to generate faster code than C compiler could ever achieve because programmer's intentions will be better expressed.
I only wish they expanded the standard library more. As far as I'm concerned, C++ doesn't really have a standard lib: STL is often awkward to use and very limited, for instance std::string is next to useless and iostream is such a pain... Then we have Boost, it comes with insane build times, incomprehensible compile error messages and multi-platform issues, so most C++ programs mostly fall back to C lib for basics like I/O, or to platform-dependent frameworks like MFC.
I also hope that external templates will work as promised. In the current form, templatized C++ works well only in a form of one giant file where everything is included in the correct order. Perhaps this is why every single C++ project in my relatively long C++ career has been using the language in "C with classes" form despite my best attempts to convince people that templates aren't always evil.