alt Hacker News> Complaining about a language having features you don't want is silly.
It might be silly if you're working on your own. Software that delivers a lot of value is usually developed and evolved not only by team, but by a team with changing members and changing leadership over the project's lifetime. The features used will be the union of all features used over the years, and while it's easy for team leads to allow the use of more features than their predecessors, it's quite hard to reduce them.
Also, you may be forced to use language features you don't want if they're used by libraries whose functionality you do want. For example, when doing low-level programming, I don't like implicit calls that I can't clearly see on the page (e.g. destructors or overloaded operators). But if libraries I want use them, then I'll have those implicit calls. But if the language doesn't have those features, libraries obviously won't use them.
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> Also, you may be forced to use language features you don't
This is quite important and often overlooked. An annoying fallacy is that people think some features are optional, but once they get heavily used, they aren't anymore. Often they quickly become an requirement and if you don't follow suit, your code is legacy or you are an idiot. But well, I guess I create legacy code upfront and the cargo cultists create modern code that turns into legacy next day.
> It might be silly if you're working on your own.
That's exactly the case when it's easiest. If you don't need a feature, just don't use it and case closed. With a team it's harder - you have to force/enforce others not to use a given feature.
> if they're used by libraries whose functionality you do want
If you're using C++ you can just use the C library you would've used otherwise, no?