Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the question. NO is the answer.
Life is too long to know C++ well.
Life is too long to be good at C++ – if you had spent all that time to become good at it, you would essentially have to work with it, too, to get back the costs, and that would just be some long, drawn-out torture.
Sufficiently advanced political correctness is indistinguishable from sarcasm.
If you want to know why Lisp doesn't win around you, find a mirror.
Well, take it from an old hand: the only reason it would be easier to program in C is that you can't easily express complex problems in C, so you don't.