One core part of C++'s philosophy where it's very consistent is that you only pay for what you use and the performance guarantees (e.g., STL) are explicit.

Another consistent part of C++ is that it gives you absolute control over memory, both allocation and layout. It's really this control that makes C++ unbeatable in performance. The good VMs can JIT their languages to match CPU performance on small routines, but they can't match C++ when it comes to manipulating big, complicated data structures.

I thought much like that (and was a huge Python fan) until I found Scala. There are cases people cite as "more than one way to do it", but they're usually superficial syntax differences. You do have to choose between passing around objects and passing around functions, but that's a choice you make in Python as well. It can handle high-performance calculation or high-level scripting, but it never feels like these are separate languages; it has a bunch of orthogonal features but any two of them combine in exactly the way you would expect (and often that combination forms something very useful).

Scala is different than C++ in the sense that Scala at its core is a simple language compared to C++ and most abstractions are built from that. That said, there are different Scalas to, Scala the 'a better Java' is a very different language from scalaz/shapeless Scala.

This seems to be the curse of any powerful core language (Scala, Haskell, ...) - on the one hand they allow you to make all kinds of useful abstractions that you can't make with e.g. Java. On the other hand, their abstractions are so powerful that they create seemingly different languages.

One could apply the same rule as C++ - stick to a subset of the language/abstractions. However, if you look at e.g. Haskell, a large number of libraries now depend on a library such as lens [1], so often it's not that much of a choice.

I think it's good that a library can become sort-of "standard" without having to be part of the language standard library (where, as the python folk say, modules go to die). We're starting to see this come together in Scala-land - if you want a Monad typeclass you use the Scalaz one, if you want a HList you use the Shapeless one, and if you want HTTP you build on top of the spray-http abstractions (I'm particularly pleased that Play intends to port to run on top of Spray). That's something that you don't really get in C++, with the possible exception of boost; there are still multiple ways to do threading, multiple ways to do event-driven, all with their own conventions.