It would have been, unless the existence of the endless baggage of old C++ code to support and maintain...

clang-tidy can be useful to modernize code.

http://clang.llvm.org/extra/clang-tidy/index.html

Template metaprogramming still sucks. And will keep sucking with concepts.

For limited set of problems templates are fine, like char/wchar_t for strings, double/float for vector algebra, template containers, etc.

Also there’re another evolved parts of the language that don’t suck. Such as the standard library: when the article was written, there was no STL _at all_.