That argument seems rather incorrectly biased. The gist is "C++ is awesome, and if you have any problems, it's because you're not awesome enough".

Tim Sweeny's talk[1] indicates that a majority of their bugs are due to low-level "unsafe" code issues. If the people writing Unreal have those problems, I think it's safe to say that it's a problem with the language. Unless you want to make the argument that Epic doesn't hired "talent and experienced" pilots.

C++ sure has places where it might be needed, but those places are growing less every day. And it's more due to the momentum, not the inherent merits of C++. If, say, Microsoft threw their weight behind a language like, say, Rust, the landscape could change. Or if they really pushed on the CLR to make the type system encompass more things and really beef up codegen, we might get somewhere. (The CLR can already easily slide into low level code, even hand-written assembly; the general codegen and limited memory management options are what kills.) Instead, we'll see more things grafted on to C++ (like recent type inference and lambdas) that make C++ somewhat less painful and further reduce the pressure to switch.

1: http://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced-...

CLR seems to be getting some new toys past Visual Studio 2013.

There is the new JIT compiler based on Visual C++ backend and more targets besides Windows Phone 8 will be supported for native code deployment.

With C++ you trade a bit better performance for a truckload of complexity, busy work and unsafety. Whether that trade-off is worth it depends on the application, but the area in which this is a good trade-off is getting smaller and smaller. The analogy with the knife doesn't make much sense. A sharp knife is safer because you have to apply less pressure, and muscles are more precise and controlled when applying less pressure. C++ is the opposite.