Lots of programmers match the right language to the right job, I think the zen of C++ is embracing the ugly as a feature; there are so many subsets of that language you never have to leave it.

Exactly, you can code like C devs (Petzold used the C subset in his famous Win32 book), go to the extreme of GUI, ORMs, Web frameworks in 1990's, inspired from Smalltalk before Java and .NET took over that role, go crazy with Haskell style programming, or chose somewhere in between.