C++ is pretty alright, IMO, but the syntax is kinda clunky though, I think probably because of some historical baggage.
Correct. Backwards compatibility is both its biggest asset and its bigger problem.
In syntax alone, you can check what Herb Sutter is doing with cppfront. Specifically, the wiki page on the postfix operators is quite enlightening. It shows some interesting examples of how by making everything a postfix operator you drop the need of -> and the duality of pre/post increment and decrement operators.
That and the weird aversion to introducing new or useful keywords, or even extending the symbol set that doesn’t even use full ASCII.
Word! The whole snafu with co_routines has been quite the laughable show. It would have been trivially sortable if C++ did something like what PHP did, using a symbol to absolutely disambiguate what is a variable and what is not. That way eg.: await is a keyword, is a variable (perhaps a functor).
To make it even better, $ is already unused in C++!
