Saw a good interview of Bjarne Stroustrup recently, including a wonderful soundbite There are just two kinds of languages: the ones everybody complains about and the ones nobody uses.
Bjarne made a great understaement the average Bell Labs programmer was significantly more able than most people’s notion of an “average programmer.” Well that could explain why C++ is expert friendly.
But on that point Bjarne is clear that C++ has indeed become too “expert friendly” at a time where the degree of effective formal education of the average software developer has declined. However, the solution is not to dumb down the programming languages but to use a variety of programming languages and educate more experts.
I disagree that more formal education is needed, but we do need to develop more expertise in software development. Personally I have used C++ a lot in the past and was always impressed by the systems that we built using it.