I am not the best person to ask, but probably with Stroustroup's recent book on Modern C++. From what I hear, he discusses the philosophy behind C++ and presents things from the perspective of, "Here's how I suggest you use C++ today." (FWIW, I happen to mostly agree with the comments elsewhere in this thread about C++ being a colossal clusterfuck of complexity ... but still thought I'd answer your question best I could).
Yeah, I have that suspicion too, and I secretly hope a language like Julia makes all of this moot: but the question I'm trying to find an answer for is "what language should I use for large-scale-but-not-distributed matrix factorization" without giving up and resorting to Fortran.
