small, custom-built interpreters

There's not much personal appeal to a Z80 emulator, but many applications I've written have small, custom-built interpreters in them, and maybe I didn't take them far enough. Is all the complaining about C++ misguided, in that the entire reason for the existence of C++ is so you can write systems that prevent having to use that language?

James Hague in Alternate Retrocomputing Histories