How, on a site like HN that champions pragmatic entrepreneurialism, can you possibly claim that the success of C++, a language that has been deployed probably more than any other except C, is controversial? It's a matter of fact. C++ won the early OO race. Maybe Java and C# and whatever have since eclipsed it, but it was still a smashing success by all objective measures, and still is by some of those measures. Yeah it's ugly, but end users don't care.