You can argue that C++ shares this honor with the likes of JavaScript and TeX. Among them only JavaScript managed to design itself out of the mess it was in the early-to-mid 2000s. There’re still the ugly parts, but each new iteration actually improved the language as a whole. All while keeping backward compatibility. Well, TeX is odd and idiosyncratic, but it’s a “niche” language. And then there’s C++ … which managed to become more and more of a mess the more they tried to “improve” it. Making big blunders in designing features, failing to rectify them in a timely manner and then cowardly leaving “broken” features in the language to preserve backward compatibility. *sigh*
Here’s a great collection of grievances:
While many of the features are useful and necessary for a modern language, all the pieces are so shoddily Frankensteined together it is hilarious.
Just the amount of “separate” Turing-complete languages it contains is out of this world: C++, its C subset, Macros, Templates, Exceptions, constexpr/consteval, co-routines. All with separate syntax, semantics, inconsistencies and foot guns and no coherent design.
And even after all that it’s still missing essential pieces for software development like dependency and build management which the specification doesn’t even acknowledge as relevant. 🤯 This leading to weird edge cases like ODR violations or “ill-formed, NDR”-like atrocities, which was summarized best in a CppCon talk:
This is a language which has false positives for the question “was this a program?”
What is C++ – Chandler Carruth, Titus Winters – CppCon 2019 at 13:23