However, the antithesis is also correct that there exist better solutions to solve the issues.

Both premises hold true.

I have an extensive assembler coding background on 6510, M68000, and i486. I had a very hard time accepting that something could be solved faster and more stable in a higher order language while the downside is more memory, more CPU etc.

More and more it turns out that programming languages are something accidentally read by machines and written by humans, even though this premise got destroyed lately by AI.

However, what I love about C++ is, that it has a basic canon of commands that can be used to build nearly everything while looking extremely ugly and hard to grasp if you don't read very slowly and accurately - so it is a very error prone and dangerous thing that rightfully got substituted by better constructs that allow for better distinctions as well as usage.

I could do everything in assembler (Hey Python users: you know that in the end everything ends up as machine code, don't you?) but it takes 100x times longer and is constantly reinventing the wheel.

Have you ever started to get into the intricacies of bit signs? No? Well, you should definitely, and to this day it gave me a lasting impression when I started wrapping my head around it, when I was 10 to 11 years old hacking my way into the world of assembler programming on C128.

You don't want to take every concept into consideration. You don't want to take interoperability into consideration. All the time!

You want to focus on the problem to solve, not the implications of the implementations all the time.

I am having such a blast very often using Python since it just works with much cognitive distraction about which language construct to use in order to get the machine doing what you want. It is so capable, enable it, to simply ensure within boundaries that the compiler uses the best decision given the context, which is up to analysis.

That's why I stopped using C++ or more precisely stopped any attempts and trying to be smart or fancy. I got to re-read and maintain the code month to years later and history showed, I don't marvel at how magic the line works and brutally smart I was at the time, but simply hate me for obscuring something in a line, that could be well understood if I had used 10 lines, while the compiler gives a damn anyway.

C++ is still necessary but every discussion to this day is about the point you made: every digit counts - and also which position, context etc. You got to be very prolific in order to put into a line what other put into 10.

Is it worth it? No.

In early days it was the correct decision. Memory was sparse, CPU power slow, and the language was small compared to today.

The last time I felt comfortable with a "assembler kind feeling" was with JavaScript before ES6. Peak jQuery level, with the most coolest concept only JavaScript has: Function.prototype.toString()

John Resig will have his place in my programming heroes olymp, who revealed this secret for me, and it opened my eyes for the beauty of higher order languages.

I admire C++, but so do I Python.

But I hope I won't have to ever use C++ again.