I actually find it more interesting that you had to postscript which says an indifferent discourse on your experience on C and C++ was not a flame against C.
While I agree with your remark wholeheartedly(Yes, C++ has a lot of toolchain, but no one decreed that you have to use everything in your toolbox), I think had I written this response, I would've added that defence somewhere. I guess it's telling how far the C vs C++ discussion went and how long it raged on...
C++ advocate here. It doesn't seem to be a strongly represented opinion here, so I think it's actually worth me chiming in.
All the criticisms are valid. Yes, C++ is like "making an octopus by nailing 4 extra legs onto a dog". None of us like having to remember that we need virtual destructors if we have derived classes, because otherwise deleting a class through the wrong derived pointer type would cause complicated problems. There's a bunch of crap there.
But I spent years coding C and I hate going back.
I miss smart pointers when I'm stuck with C. I miss containers that don't suck. I miss lame stuff like log4cpp and boost::asio.
If you're willing to accept a bunch of dependencies and can handle serious (sometimes grevious) conceptual overheads, you can write native code with an expressiveness approaching Python. To me, that makes it all worth it.
While I agree with your remark wholeheartedly(Yes, C++ has a lot of toolchain, but no one decreed that you have to use everything in your toolbox), I think had I written this response, I would've added that defence somewhere. I guess it's telling how far the C vs C++ discussion went and how long it raged on...