> One of the absolute worst features of C++ is how it makes a lot of things so context-dependent - which just means that when you look at the code, a local view simply seldom gives enough context to know what is going on.
Good point. Very good point.
Having spent few years developing for the Linux kernel I can say that the most cluttered code I dealt with was the network stack. And exactly because it was done in C++-ish way. It makes an extensive use of tables of function pointers, which is basically an analog of a C++ virtual table. A socket depending on its type would get a pointer to a different table and that table would define the actual flow, say, of the recv() call in the kernel. The concept is very elegant, and it translates into a more compact code, but it also makes tracing the code by hand hard.
So, yeah, Linus got a point there :)