The whole language doesn't scale.

When templates came out we tried to get some serious dynamism into our app (we had what amounted to two different internal implementations of valueholder depending on where you were using the domain object.

Result? 26 hour link times.

We had the vendor's compiler engineer on site and he did some things but ultimately it didn't work well.

We replaced the mechanism with a macro expansion to get decent link times.

We also switched to a massively parallel make system.

Touching a base class or core header file would result in howls of anguish.

I'll note that Cocoa is amazingly successful where Taligent failed. If you look into the taligent code base, you see a lot of NextStep-isms. Taligent was basically an attempt to clone NextStep using C++. It wasn't even thoroughly original in design and it failed because the language wasn't as capable as Objective C.

Another project that suffered the same fate was Lotus Improv. An N-dimensional spreadsheet with killer visualization capabilities. Written on NextStep, all attempted ports failed because they just couldn't work around the rigidity of "conventional" languages.

Stroustrup and Gosling ought to be tried for fraud.