Basically, my question is, did I miss something?

I believe you did, but it has less to do with programming languages and more to do with the human tendency to denigrate the unfamiliar. We do that. It’s natural. Rising above it takes a willingness to endure the cognitive dissonance that comes with the comparisons to the familiar when learning something new.

You’re doing two things you shouldn’t:

First, you’re looking at one language through the lens of another. One of the things you’ll start to understand as your horizons become broader is that programming languages are just toolboxes with variations on the same set of familiar tools. The variations exist to solve specific problems. Some toolboxes contain basic tools that force you to do a lot of things yourself; others give you things to make certain complex tasks easier. My wife, who makes jewelry, has a dozen pairs of pliers that have very unusual jaws designed to solve specific problems. To me they’re just funny-looking because her problems aren’t mine.

Second, you’re looking at every tool that’s not already in your toolbox as something ripe for abuse because it doesn’t fit your concept of “how it is.” I have news for you: anyone with a lot of experience in a language can find a way to abuse any of its constructs. C — and don’t get me wrong here, because I’ve written a ton of it — is especially rife with opportunities for abuse. Writing C is like owning a chainsaw: it’s a great tool for removing unwanted limbs, but the line between use and abuse lies in whether those limbs are attached to your trees or your neighbors. Constructs that enforce better behavior are the equivalent of adding blade guards and chain brakes to chain saws: they were put there by the more-disciplined to keep them from having to clean up the messy results of the less-disciplined abusing their tools and hurting themselves or others. A little light bulb will go on above your head the first time you realize you can do a complete reimplementation of a class without having to wonder if any other code is getting away with directly writing structure fields instead of calling the setter function you so thoughtfully provided.

Or is C++ more popular purely by merit of luck or marketing?

None of the above. C++ is in wide use for the same reason as any other popular language: people have found it a useful tool for getting things done.

People want to use OOP. Also programmers want to learn as few new things as possible. Thus, when C++ first came out. It gained massive popularity thanks to backwards compatibility with C and because it implemented OOP, which was gaining massive popularity at the time. This popularity created so much momentum, that it maintains lots of it right until todays.

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But todays, many better OOP languages exist and there is much less emphasis on backward C compatibility. I would reccommend looking into Java, C#, Python or Ruby for modern OOP language.

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