First I was a bit disappointed by how much hate C++ gets but I'm happy to see it on the positive side even by just a tiny amount.

That said, this poll is not online for the same period of time. Not that negative points could take away anything C++ can do for me.

You can only love or hate C++ if you've used it, and I would guess that many readers on hackernews have never had the pleasure of using C++ a lot before; i.e., as a professional C++ programmer (though this would be an interesting poll to take!).

I listed C++ as a dislike, and I believe it deserves the hate. C++ basically means full employment for PL engineers (like myself) to build decent parsers (C++ is almost unparsable), compilers, bug checkers (C++ code is dense with bugs that can be found via analysis), and so on. I came to a point in my career early on where I realized that this was just ridiculous, so I got out of the C++ tool industry just as fast as I got into it (and worked on Scala instead, sort of ironic).

Many people have to use C++; e.g., if you are writing embedded systems, OSes (device drivers), or games. Most everyone not in those industries will just continue to stay away from it.