thanks for the suggestion, it seems indeed to appeal to my taste. However, i think it's not really adopted, so I won't learn it 

 I guess that it depends. It has many more features than C which makes it harder for beginners like me.

like, I don't understand what's "smart" about smart pointers, and why exist... 

 Smart pointers are extremely useful and make writing C++ a lot safer.

One of the most common bugs C has is leaking resources and double free-ing.

A smart pointer makes sure your resources are deallocated when they go out of scope. A shared smart pointer is one that when it gets copied, it points to the same resource but increases the ownership count, decreses the ownership count when it goes out of scope. So for shared smart pointers their resources only get release when  the ownership count drops to 0. 

 C++ also has templates (one definition multiple types) and concepts (constrain the accepted types to have particular properties) which are all resolved at compile time. 

 templates are just complicated garbage code generators that take ages to compile, aka "generics", i have written dozens of code generators for teh same kinds of purposes and i could count the number of times it's been important on two hands in the last 8 years

interfaces achieve the same result but force you to actually think about it so the compiler doesn't have to spend many seconds trying to figure out what you mean when you refer to a method on a type that isn't explicitly tied to it

i have lost count of how many times i've used interfaces for this kind of polymorphism but it's also quite overrated, it's more useful for plugging modules together without needing to know the internals, ie, it helps with encapsulation

go has simple types of generics but only on value types, and they are actually handy a lot (especially between types of integers and between strings and byte buffers) 

 templates are just complicated garbage code generators that take ages to compile, aka "generics", i have written dozens of code generators for teh same kinds of purposes and i could count the number of times it's been important on two hands in the last 8 years

interfaces achieve the same result but force you to actually think about it so the compiler doesn't have to spend many seconds trying to figure out what you mean when you refer to a method on a type that isn't explicitly tied to it

i have lost count of how many times i've used interfaces for this kind of polymorphism but it's also quite overrated, it's more useful for plugging modules together without needing to know the internals, ie, it helps with encapsulation

go has simple types of generics but only on value types, and they are actually handy a lot (especially between types of integers and between strings and byte buffers) nostr.fmt.wiz.biz 

 here is the thing, I can't think of any situation where I would absolutely need these things, so 🤷

I guess I am a minimalist 

 Python is where I come from.

JS I tried many years ago and hated. Rust I am not sure, seems too complex. 

 it's really hard to read as well, and the "safety" is illusory nonsense based on threat models that are way out of date (stack smashing and buffer overflow attacks are so 20 years ago, much more important is protocol attacks and if you can't read the code then lol) 

 Interesting. Rust is a bit complex, but you can learn it by doing some practice. Of course, you need to have a lot of patience. 

 the thing is that I don't want to become a full time dev.

I want to do math, and write/test the math and the algos with an efficient language, but I don't have time to master it completely.

I want to spend time thinking about the logic, not the syntax, that's why I like Python. Because it's simple, and easy to become good at it. 

 Sounds good. I’m not against Python or math. I think both are necessary 

 yeah that's how I felt.

To do A I need to do B and learn C.

Doing B requires doing D,E,F..
By learning C you need to learn also G, H, and so on.

And the tree becomes big, and at the end I forgot what I wanted to do lmao. 

 Yup it's a fun time. It's not for every task. Pick the right tool to do the job is far more important. C will always be there when we need it. It's an important language and I hope we keep it alive for as long as we can.  

 none of this needs to be understood to write reasonable Go code

it's only really when you start shuffling large amounts of memory that Go's GC fails to work in your favour and you need to start to look at schedulers and buffer freelists

c++ boost libraries are a constant breaking change party that never stops, and c library versions don't seem to be much kinder but at least they are a bit slower moving

if your task is analytics, you want simple languages, that's why most mathematicians just use mathematica, but if your data crunching is memory heavy you need an efficient language and preferably binary not interpreted (or at least VM based)

C really is mainly for fast performance and low level systems stuff, and anyone who tells you that you need to understand OOP garbage to write systems code is just straight up lying because windows, mac and linux kernels are all written in C, not C++, for a reason (that being unintended complexity)

i wish OOP would just die, it was a dumb idea that Jobs and Gates got hooked on because of Smalltalk and it was possibly the least performant model possible for GUI programming, structural typed and concurrent sequential processes are much more simple to reason about and compile for these same purposes (i used to be an amiga user as a kid, and it pained me so much that a C compiler and the manuals cost more than 2x the hardware)

it was just an accident of history that ONE GUI development project that both apple and microsoft's CEOs went to check out at Xerox used an interpreted OOP language and now we all suffer from this eternally 

 > C really is mainly for fast performance and low level systems stuff, and anyone who tells you that you need to understand OOP garbage to write systems code 

I haven't seen any real system level code in any sort of OOP, I'm sure it exists, but very rare from what I can tell. The best case is Arduino libraries really what come to mind, and that's just so things feel more comfortable to a broader range of developers. OOP is a core of CS fundamentals in college (or at least was the whole time I was there). Only the EE and CPE people learn in functional stuff because thats all we used.  

 Not sure how much I can add to this. @ChipTuner covered most everything I would have to say.

In my personal experience, I only started appreciating the complexity of C++ with respect to C - in other words the ++ part - whenever I would encounter the limitations of C.

At this point in your learning process, you shouldn’t fret about what happens under the hood with C/C++ programming like target CPU architecture, build systems and makefiles, talking with the kernel, all this is too overwhelming at first.

I suggest that you begin by porting basic python code to C/C++

Like reading keyboard input, string manipulation, data types and structures, reading/writing to files, sockets, threads, etc.

You start with things step by step. And then you decide how deep you want to go.