My only problem with C++ is that it’s too verbose. my eyes need to parse huuge chunks of things when I just want some convenient syntax for it. otherwise the idioms are pretty universal for most programming languages nowadays.

The trouble with that is the more mental capacity you exert on the language the less you have available for the task at hand.

C++ is quite amenable to making things less verbose. For example: Instead of a standard library algorithm taking a pair of iterators, you could have a function taking a container and calling the other function with its start() and end(). And then, with newer versions of the language, you can use a ranges-based function. There are lots of such syntactic hacks, from `using` through typed literals all the way to preprocessor macros (which we want to avoid, but are still there).

That's how you emulate language features that aren't there originally. I've "impelemented" a static code block, like in Java:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/34321324/1593077

and that's all in C++98. The implementation is a bit ugly but the use is terse and self-expalantory.

Try Java