> I have to ask - does anyone actually use half of the C++ features? Exactly how much of C++'s 1600-page specification can be attributed to its success?
do you also use all the classes of Python or Java's standard library ? C++17's spec is ~1400 pages (http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2017/n471...) but the actual language spec stops at page 406, the remaining 1000 pages are the specifications for the standard library.
And in these 400 pages of specs, there are a lot of examples, grammars... just look at the chapter on templates: it's ~80 pages but more than half are valid & invalid code examples.