The difficulty in both languages lies in pointer manipulation and understanding the system below, it does not lie in using classes or templates.
That's utterly untrue. The low-level details of C++ are mostly the same as C's, unless you want to write a shared library in C++ and thus need to extern the C++ symbols, or need to worry about the details of the object-system implementation like vtables, or need to mess with streams and layer them over some communication medium.
What makes C++ fucking hard is the syntax explosion that feels like cleaning up a New Year's Eve confetti with your bare sweaty hands, the template voodoo, and the design patterns that they have tacked on the language to make it more palatable to Satan.
To make it worse, the language is both broad and deep. You can't learn C++ by reading the standard. You have to dip into the culture of one of the big vendors, or schools of programming, to find out what subset of the language is to your liking. Are you writing Bjarne's C++ or GoF's or Alexandrescu's? or perhaps you would prefer to old HP/STL/Meyer C++ to the new kitchen-sink BOOST C++?
Contrast this to Common Lisp, which is a very broad but relatively shallow language; you can read the first few sections of every chapter of the manual and come off a good Lisper, go back and dig deeper and you only get better. OO, functional and procedural Lisp looks relatively the same. If you don't understand a construct, you look up the documentation of the symbol, see its evaluation model and presto. C++? You don't see what's being implemented because higher-level designs are being kludged and modeled with dickish, brittle and contrived tools -- they have no way out of this, as the language insists on C pseudo-similarity and refuses to adopt any kind of clean macro system; they're running out of syntax and CPP is unforgiving. Understanding C++ code then becomes a matter of psychological profiling of the author and even scholarly exegesis and deconstruction ("What did he intend to say?", etc.) requiring a level of empathy hard to muster when you're, in fact, wishing ill and misfortune on the bastard who forced you to look at this mess.
If I were to extend C by adding python style classes on top of it, I would end up with roughly the same number of keywords. I don't think it's true that C++ has a lot of new concepts in the language itself.
I agree that C++ is very library oriented, and it changes your approach to the language, but this is not a fault of the language itself, this is a side-effect of its very wide popularity.
If you have a pattern used by a library, then that is the fault of the library, but not a fault of the language. The language does not come with any patterns.
Templates in C++ are not good, but they are not widely used in the real world. Most people ignore them, and that's good so.
The STL is optional. Templates are widely used in container formats, but in real world programming, for example when people model shopping carts or so, most of the code out there does not use templates. Let's get real here and look at a code repository like codeproject or codeguru - those sites hold diverse examples of real world code - and template usage is minimal.
Templates in C++ are not good, but they are not widely used in the real world.
Depends on where your "real world" is. C++ usages are vendor and library dependent. My C++ code looked different in MFC/COM/ATL than in FLTK and that too was different than Qt. Choosing the right C++ becomes a matter of choosing the right vendor, and if that choice isn't up to you, well, tough luck.
If I were to extend C by adding python style classes on top of it, I would end up with roughly the same number of keywords.
You can use Objective-C as a datapoint here. That's Smalltalk on top of C. You can use the same sort of trick (delimiting the dynamic sends) to recycle the C keywords in the dynamic context, and end up with a language with just a few more keywords than C.
That's utterly untrue. The low-level details of C++ are mostly the same as C's, unless you want to write a shared library in C++ and thus need to extern the C++ symbols, or need to worry about the details of the object-system implementation like vtables, or need to mess with streams and layer them over some communication medium.
What makes C++ fucking hard is the syntax explosion that feels like cleaning up a New Year's Eve confetti with your bare sweaty hands, the template voodoo, and the design patterns that they have tacked on the language to make it more palatable to Satan.
To make it worse, the language is both broad and deep. You can't learn C++ by reading the standard. You have to dip into the culture of one of the big vendors, or schools of programming, to find out what subset of the language is to your liking. Are you writing Bjarne's C++ or GoF's or Alexandrescu's? or perhaps you would prefer to old HP/STL/Meyer C++ to the new kitchen-sink BOOST C++?
Contrast this to Common Lisp, which is a very broad but relatively shallow language; you can read the first few sections of every chapter of the manual and come off a good Lisper, go back and dig deeper and you only get better. OO, functional and procedural Lisp looks relatively the same. If you don't understand a construct, you look up the documentation of the symbol, see its evaluation model and presto. C++? You don't see what's being implemented because higher-level designs are being kludged and modeled with dickish, brittle and contrived tools -- they have no way out of this, as the language insists on C pseudo-similarity and refuses to adopt any kind of clean macro system; they're running out of syntax and CPP is unforgiving. Understanding C++ code then becomes a matter of psychological profiling of the author and even scholarly exegesis and deconstruction ("What did he intend to say?", etc.) requiring a level of empathy hard to muster when you're, in fact, wishing ill and misfortune on the bastard who forced you to look at this mess.