when I didn't know better (i.e., didn't know many other languages), back in 96 to maybe 2002 or so, I tremendously enjoyed C++. I felt so powerful. It was hard to get things right and fast following the literature at the time, but hey, low-level, power, yay!

Then I took a turn and learnt LISP, ML, and a whole potpourri of functional languages. Things were so easy to express in comparison to looking at _all_ the details _all_ the time. I dropped my C++ for quite a while.

Fast forward a decade, and I spent about a decade writing C++11 code. Then C++17. I didn't particularly enjoy it, but it got the job done. In the environment at the time, alternatives were not accepted, so I obliged.

Now I just see loaded and unsecured footguns everywhere when I look at C++. Note that I'm still paid to write C++, but after learning to trust smart compilers in semantically proper languages, learned about data oriented programming, learned about all the bad from the pointer-laden object-oriented style, about the problems of (thread) synchronization C++ style vs. message passing between programs (CSP), ... I grew to despise it.

Frankly, nowadays, I'd rather write in Ada, drop all the "smart" constructs whose smell reek through the whole code-base, and all the implied semantics of various interfaces which are not described on language-level but (maybe, hopefully) in the comments ... the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach of C++ bites us regularly, but still, the environment has a hard time accepting non-C++ code.