Bjarne Stroustrup's central
design goal in the development of
C++ was the philosophy that
you don't pay for what you don't use. This sets C++ apart from most other
OO programming languages, where in order to use the language, you have to carry around all of the language's bagg..err, features, even the ones you don't want, even the ones that are useless or downright silly. If you want to use C++ and don't like a feature, don't use it.
An example is the school of thought known as "
generic programming", whose
more extreme advocates consider
object-oriented programming anathema but still use C++ to implement their ideas.