> There are enough smart people claiming this that you can't dismiss it (Linus Torvalds for example)

Torvald's anti-C++ rant was full of factual errors when he wrote it and it hasn't improved with age.

If you want to point to "smart people claiming C++ was a mistake" you need to actually use people who actually know & have experience with C++ in the first place - which isn't Torvalds.

There's also other smart people, like John Carmack, who have been converted from C to C++ and now prefer the later especially for working in a team environment. C++ is far from perfect, but there's also pretty strong arguments that it does still represent an improvement over C on average. Yet (almost) nobody argues that C was a mistake.

>There's also other smart people, like John Carmack, who have been converted from C to C++ and now prefer the later especially for working in a team environment. C++ is far from perfect, but there's also pretty strong arguments that it does still represent an improvement over C on average. Yet (almost) nobody argues that C was a mistake.

Agreed. Here is Wikipedia article on criticism of C++. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_C%2B%2B

The second sentence has a short list of some of the smart people who don't like it: "Among the critics have been: Robert Pike, Joshua Bloch, Linus Torvalds, Donald Knuth, Richard Stallman, and Ken Thompson". I'll leave it up to the reader to research why they criticize C++ (not C). However in the references there's a good article from Rob Pike:

https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...

Being critical of something does not at all mean they don't like it or, more significantly, think it's a mistake.

Rob Pike's post there, for example, absolutely never comes anywhere close to calling C++ "a mistake."

I don’t understand. For what reason would Pike and Thompson have created Go if they had no criticism of C?

> One thing I highly disagree with in your statement is this: " C++ was about as close to excellence as we could’ve hoped for."

It’s fine to disagree, but it seems mildly disingenuous to omit all the qualifiers I (very deliberately and intentionally) prefaced that statement with when you do so. In that sense, you’re actually disagreeing with an opinion I don’t actually hold.

I omitted out of brevity. But ok, I'll put it in:

>All things considered, for the time, given the paradigms we understood to be effective, and for the value within the design space, C++ was about as close to excellence as we could’ve hoped for. It didn’t replace C, nor was it meant to, but for its purpose it was a great success.

I disagree with this entire statement. It's not even close to excellence even given all the deliberate and intentional qualifiers you put around it.

I believe that when I re-clarify my comment in this context it becomes clear that I am in totality disagreeing with your statement.

I think C++ became popular due to luck in the same way javascript came to dominate the frontend. I believe there could've been a number of possible better alternative outcomes if luck would have been different.

Quoting "celebrities" as if their word is infallible for some reason is just silly.

Torvalds has ranted about many things he knows nothing about and this is no exception. His opinions belong in the trash bin and should be ignored, not used as evidence.