How can you be sure of that? Each language has found it core market: C++ is the leading language in the game industry. C is used for embed software Java is the everyone's language and with it awesome j2ee stack is becoming the de facto language for programming entreprise application.

And the list goes ...

So as one said, hating a language is imature. You don't like it, don't use it.

C++ is used for gaming because it gets the job done and doesn't have competitor that's equally fast, portable and supported by all SDKs.

Similar thing was true for PHP for some time: it wasn't pretty, but it was good enough, and none of the alternatives were as ubiquitous as mod_php.

I've been using C++ professionally and personally for a good ten years now, and aside from compilation speed, I don't really have any complaints about it. Use it properly, use Boost, and it's quite decent.

I only wish it had some of the sexy features of other languages, but C++0x (or whatever it's called now) is addressing a lot of that.

It's really hard to take the things that C++ does well and do it significantly better. I think D has largely proven that.