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Yup. Poor schmucks, they fell for it :-) You're welcome to justify this way ("C++ may be ugly, but it had to be in order to get popular"), but I'm not sure it's helping your case.
Yup. C++ takes a lot of flak for every instance where the same code (in C, like) compiles to something slower. It doesn't seem to take the same flak for all the places where the C code gets bigger, but that's neither here nor there. Unless you work for someplace like Palm, and then you just don't use C++ :-)
And, oddly enough, doing quite well by it. But then Java has a marketing budget like no language before it. I *do* think it's a step in the right direction from C++. Or the wrong direction from most dynamic languages, so it depends how you look at it :-)
The performance thing that you mention is a good point. Languages certainly must be designed with efficiency in mind. Whether that's programmer-time efficiency, cpu-time efficiency, memory-efficiency or something else determines a lot about the language.
I consider popularity concerns ("if it doesn't look like C, nobody will use it") and time-to-market concerns ("but we don't have time to make a real VM language for Java! Use the language directly") pretty irrelevant to whether I should use the language, and what I should use it for. Instead I'll judge it based on its actual merits ("gee, that's a lot uglier than C" and "gee, that's really slow", respectively, in the two examples above).
Yup. Speaking of ugly code. It gives you all the syntactic ugliness of C++ and the reduced range of debugging tools, but without the object-oriented design.
You can say "but you can refactor". The codebase has to be *very* clean and *very* OO already for that to work well, though, especially at the talent level of most current MUD coders.
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