C++ is simultaneously one of the most powerful, expressive languages and is only second to C or ASM in terms of execution speed of the produced binaries. There are less and less downsides with each revision of the standard. You can even do functional programming in it now (at no cost), and it's uncommon to use raw pointers. As for error messages, clang does a good job of holding your hand.
It's for serious, low latency applications, not some useless soy apps. Right tool for the job. For your soy apps, there's always Ruby, Clojure, and JS waiting for you.