C++ is like...

trying to build an octopus by nailing legs onto a dog.

This put me in mind of Dijkstra (I wasn't sure if it was actually Wirth but the 'net assures me it was EWD) -- as we can see here:

• FORTRAN's tragic fate has been its wide acceptance, mentally chaining thousands and thousands of programmers to our past mistakes.
• LISP has been jokingly described as "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.
• When FORTRAN has been called an infantile disorder, full PL/1, with its growth characteristics of a dangerous tumor, could turn out to be a fatal disease.

That 2nd one isn't about FORTRAN but I enjoyed it so much I left it in. and then for some reason I stumbled across this brief incomplete and mostly wrong history of computer languages which I thought hilarious.