My bad, I should've specified legacy C++. You're right that with lambdas now C++ has gotten much better.

However I would argue against the STL being well thought out. Every single large-scale C++ project I've worked on threw it out the window before even staring out. Our current project already takes an hour and a half to compile without parallel builds and barely uses templates at all.

I still prefer plain old C to C++ most of the time.