[phao]

This, I believe, touches upon the accidental versus essential complexity theme.

I believe people, in general, agree C is too simple of a programming language to actually deal with all the essential complexity of modern software development in various cases.

The actual complaint people have about C++ is that it has too much extra unnecessary accidental complexity due to weird ways features interact.

The analogy of the Surgeon I believe should be adjusted having these two points in mind. Generally speaking, surgeons would agree that "scalpel and whiskey" are too simple of a tool set for doing modern surgery. However, if you take modern surgeon tools and add a bunch of weirdness to them, then surgeons would reject them on the grounds of being more complicated than needed.

> A bad surgeon could also be overwhelmed by the amount of modern tools and use the wrong one.

When this is contrasted with the C++ situation, I believe the comparison would be fair only if all the modern features in C++ had to do with the inherent essential complexity of software development. That is not the case (at all). Expert developers have been talking about how C++ is unnecessarily complicated for ages (before C++03 even; back when things were simpler in terms of weird language feature interactions).