My own take on the original article that this author is responding to: >C++ IDEs suck. Big time. I find Xcode quite a pleasure to use. The autocompletion, deb

My own take on the original article that this author is responding to: >C++ IDEs suck. Big time. I find Xcode quite a pleasure to use. The autocompletion, debugging, the quick moving around the interface, splitting files side-by-side.. I haven't used other IDEs besides emacs, but nothing about Xcode is getting in my way. >It’s an unmanageable language. Compared to a dynamic language or a weakly-typed language (I'm looking at you C, and a few others), I'd say the strong typing of C++ alone helps in code manageability. And, unlike Swift or Clojure or other languages, I find putting an API in a header file and an implementation in a translation unit really helps me reduce time later on. It's an automatic API summary without needing to review your implementation. When I move on from one part of a program to another, I don't want to study my source code just to remember what the access is. Just show me the header. I miss header files in other languages. >It’s a counterproductive language. and >STL sucks. The tools in the STL are serious time-savers. Sure you can choose not use them or implement your own, but in either scenario, you will likely spend a lot more time writing code than working on your actual problem or idea. In that regard, I'd say C++ and its standard library are very productive. And all the new multithreading and async primitives in C++11/14 take this productivity to a new level. >namespace stupidity Without namespaces, you have to work harder to name your stuff and to debug name clashes. Every good language that I've worked with uses namespaces. I consider them a requirement for any language that will handle a large project. >The language sucks. It sucks because it’s so complicated. C++ is probably the most complicated language I will ever use. I'm not sure why that makes it suck, though. Unlike many other languages, where it is wise and expected that you can keep the whole language in your head and understand entirely how it works, C++ is a different thing altogether. Nobody on this planet probably understands 100% of C++ -- including its creator, who has said that he gets maybe 80% there. In C++ you can use a small and ordinary part of the language and choose to go to the complicated stuff only if you really want to, but rarely do you need to. Yes, complex metaprogramming is mind-bending in what you can do -- and also, you cannot do a lot of it any other language. But you don't have to do any of that, and most people probably shouldn't, until they want to have some fun and really see how deep C++ can go. And a lot of the most complicated stuff that was important to understand in the past is no longer required reading for new programmers to the language, since the latest standards handle many things for you automatically. I.e. just writing "new" or "delete" and deciding when and how to do so are no longer required and actually discouraged thanks to smart pointers.