Donald Knuth is an amazing person, but I'm not sure he's necessarily the same authority in a discussion about industrial programming languages as he is in a discussion about computer science.
So to change your analogy, it would be like quoting Sun Tzu about the disadvantages of modern main battle tanks, using the Art of War. Sure, the principles in the Art of War are solid, but are we sure that they really apply to a discussion about Leopard 2 vs M1 Abrams?
That said, I'm not a fan of C++ either. I think its problems are intractable because they'd have to break backwards compatibility to clean the language and I'm not sure they can do that, unless they want to "Perl 6"-it (aka kill the language).
Fair enough, but I still wouldn't disregard Sun Tzu or Donald Knuth as making arguments comprised of "insanity rooted in nostalgia." That was my primary point.
In any event, Knuth specifically made statements dismissive of C++ 25 years ago that I believe are still valid today. I must have missed reading Sun Tzu's missive on mechanized warfare from the 6th century BC. ;)
Indeed, we can both agree on the backwards compatibility problem. I'm waiting on a C++ build as I type this. Also, I really like the new language features like std::unique_ptr std::function and lambdas.
I'd still rather do my true low-level programming in C bound with a garbage-collected higher-level language for less hardware-focused or performance-critical work instead of bolting those features on to C by committee over the span of decades. For example, C shared libraries with Lua bindings or LuaJIT FFI are bliss in my humble opinion.
So to change your analogy, it would be like quoting Sun Tzu about the disadvantages of modern main battle tanks, using the Art of War. Sure, the principles in the Art of War are solid, but are we sure that they really apply to a discussion about Leopard 2 vs M1 Abrams?
That said, I'm not a fan of C++ either. I think its problems are intractable because they'd have to break backwards compatibility to clean the language and I'm not sure they can do that, unless they want to "Perl 6"-it (aka kill the language).