Interesting, I don't find modern C++ verbose at all. 'auto', range-based for-loops and structured bindings did a great job at reducing the verbosity of C++98.

On top of that, C++ allows to design very concise APIs. (One of my favorite examples is sol2: https://github.com/ThePhd/sol2).

Library code involving templates, on the other hand, can be pretty complex and hard to read. Concepts and other C++20 features (like [[no_unique_address]]) are certainly an improvement, but only new projects with no backwards compatibility requirements can actually use them (unconditionally).

The trouble with that is the more mental capacity you exert on the language the less you have available for the task at hand.

C++ is quite amenable to making things less verbose. For example: Instead of a standard library algorithm taking a pair of iterators, you could have a function taking a container and calling the other function with its start() and end(). And then, with newer versions of the language, you can use a ranges-based function. There are lots of such syntactic hacks, from `using` through typed literals all the way to preprocessor macros (which we want to avoid, but are still there).

That's how you emulate language features that aren't there originally. I've "impelemented" a static code block, like in Java:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/34321324/1593077

and that's all in C++98. The implementation is a bit ugly but the use is terse and self-expalantory.

Try Java