I can say this is not true for the general case. C++ has - against the odds, in my opinion - been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. It is not exactly design by committee, because there are a lot of (semi)independent developers driving the design choices. The choice of features for a given release is by committee, however, and reflects a wide variety of opinions and interests. Not the least of which are the people actually providing compiler support. Functional programming in C++ is still not always facilitated by the standard library, but it's miles beyond where it was a decade ago: moving in the right direction.