I'd argue C++ is doing it really well. They took their shitty awful C++03 base that made developers around the globe cry at night, and tried appending on top of that mess less terrible concepts.
And now, modern C++11/14 doesn't look anything like C++03. Which is a blessing and a curse - they effectively depreciated a huge swathe of old practices for better new ones (refs over pointers, smart constructs over raw new / delete, lambdas and auto over void* function pointers, soon were going to have concepts and static if instead of preprocessor ifdefs).
But that comes with a price. The price is that C++ is huge, the compilers are slow due to the complexity, and it is really analogous to per project technical debt.
D exists because C++ was too slow. Walter (and Andre) saw this huge shortfall in standard C++03 and this entire class of functionality that should be there, because it doesn't have a performance overhead, but wasn't. Maybe they also saw how C# and Java were useful and popular, but they put this massive VM under them to simplify the implementation and standardization.
Go exists because C++ was too big - for its purpose, of web server development, you wanted native performance with natural asynchrony and multi processing. It still doesn't have generics because it is pretty much a domain language, I think.
Rust exists because C++, in the wake of C++11, is still a complicated mess of syntax. And in order to maintain backwards compatibility, C++ is terribly unsafe and every line of code can destroy your program. I think Rust is as close to the future of native languages, because it does the C++ thing - a general purpose language, where everything is deterministic and predictable because it is direct binary translation between language constructs and assembler with limited magic - and does that backwards compatibility break to fix the significant flaws.
I still don't like the Rust syntax much, but it might one day grow on me. I don't think its really approachable though, I'd definitely be interested in trying a "pythonic" static typed language that emphasizes safety and productivity while maintaining the poster C++ ideology of providing reasonable abstractions that don't hide the details, but let the expert more intuitively interact with them.
Have you looked into Nimrod? It is different from Python in that it embraces some concepts that Python rejects (e.g., AST macros, which are actually quite brilliant in Nimrod) but it's the most pythonic programming language that I know of that compiles to native code.
Thank you for recommending Nimrod; I'd never really looked into it before. Nimrod looks like a cute little language, but it seems to lack a staple of many other languages: support for the '\t' character in indentation.
And now, modern C++11/14 doesn't look anything like C++03. Which is a blessing and a curse - they effectively depreciated a huge swathe of old practices for better new ones (refs over pointers, smart constructs over raw new / delete, lambdas and auto over void* function pointers, soon were going to have concepts and static if instead of preprocessor ifdefs).
But that comes with a price. The price is that C++ is huge, the compilers are slow due to the complexity, and it is really analogous to per project technical debt.
D exists because C++ was too slow. Walter (and Andre) saw this huge shortfall in standard C++03 and this entire class of functionality that should be there, because it doesn't have a performance overhead, but wasn't. Maybe they also saw how C# and Java were useful and popular, but they put this massive VM under them to simplify the implementation and standardization.
Go exists because C++ was too big - for its purpose, of web server development, you wanted native performance with natural asynchrony and multi processing. It still doesn't have generics because it is pretty much a domain language, I think.
Rust exists because C++, in the wake of C++11, is still a complicated mess of syntax. And in order to maintain backwards compatibility, C++ is terribly unsafe and every line of code can destroy your program. I think Rust is as close to the future of native languages, because it does the C++ thing - a general purpose language, where everything is deterministic and predictable because it is direct binary translation between language constructs and assembler with limited magic - and does that backwards compatibility break to fix the significant flaws.
I still don't like the Rust syntax much, but it might one day grow on me. I don't think its really approachable though, I'd definitely be interested in trying a "pythonic" static typed language that emphasizes safety and productivity while maintaining the poster C++ ideology of providing reasonable abstractions that don't hide the details, but let the expert more intuitively interact with them.