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The problem with posts about C++ on Hacker News is that people who aren't experienced C++ programmers (you've been using C++ for a semester? do tell) feel compe

The problem with posts about C++ on Hacker News is that people who aren't experienced C++ programmers (you've been using C++ for a semester? do tell) feel compelled to write posts explaining the problems with C++.

yosefk 10y ago
As someone who's had to deal with C++ since the last century, I find that one problem with C++ is that people who aren't experienced C++ programmers can't get shit done, especially in a code base where experienced C++ programmers have demonstrated their erudition and knowledge of C++ arcana in all its glory. In fact, the intersection of people who had the patience to learn enough C++ to get shit done and people who also have the patience or basic desire to actually get shit done (as opposed to programming wanky wrappers and stuff) is annoyingly small (this however is not true everywhere, I'd expect no such problem to exist with game programmers, for example.) The fact that a language is terrible for newcomers is a real problem, and a newcomer is a very good judge of that even if they aren't a very good judge of other aspects. Especially loathsome are those people who teach, say, undergraduates majoring in physics some C++ as a way to introduce them to programming. You might think that someone who manages to deal with the math needed to do physics would be able to absorb C++, and often you'd think wrong; one physics undergrad told an experienced programmer after trying to understand what the fuck cout<<x actually does, "your head is full of garbage!", by which he meant that the amount of completely arbitrary rules that you need to memorize was not something that dealing with math and science prepared him for. From the above I conclude that people who have a semester's worth of experience in C++ might not be C++ experts but they certainly know enough to burn the instructor who chose C++ in the first place at the stake.
- sseagull 10y ago
  > what the fuck cout<<x actually does I'm not sure where that conversation would go. It prints to stdout. Would the student say the same thing about printf("%d", x)? How far down the rabbit hole did he want to go? Stream insertion syntax os pretty bad, though, I'll agree with that. Especially when you want to print floating point.
  - gravypod 10y ago
    The conversation then shifts to how it does this? What if I want to print to something else? Why if I want to read differently from a stream? When you provide a shorthand that's all well and good but when you TEACH a short hand it's what's ONLY used by the students. The students will assume there is no other way to read and write then using >> and << which is horribly incorrect. These are largely inadequate measures for reading and writing in my experience as you probably want to do formatting which printf just does better. So many of the students in my CS class this semester can't do the first lab, which in all essence, is a tokenizer because they don't know that there are other ways for writing to, or reading from, a stream! A short hand should only be used in a majority if it can do everything the long hand way can do. Also for anyone interested what my first C++ project looked like you can see here: https://web.njit.edu/~gwryan/CS280/CS280-Program-1-Fall-2016-R1.pdf https://web.njit.edu/~gwryan/CS280/CS280-Program-1-Fall-2016... https://git.gravypod.com/gravypod/school/tree/master/cs280/homework/program_1 https://git.gravypod.com/gravypod/school/tree/master/cs280/h... It's not my best work, but if any C++ people want to notify me of things I'm doing that's wrong I'm more then happy to learn.
    - sseagull 10y ago
      I will agree with the point that the other methods of reading/writing from streams aren't taught early enough, and that formatted output is pretty bad with streams. I've actually written a wrapper around snprintf for printing in c++ (I should put that on github sometime) Your project looks good. Two minor observations: 1.) You have 'using' statements in a header file. This is fine for a small project, but is considered bad form in larger projects (every file that includes that header will end up including the 'using' statements. This can cause collisions in large projects). 2.) Const correctness is a good habit to get into. (Ie, only pass non-const references if you are actually changing the object in the function)
      - gravypod 10y ago
        I wasn't sure how const worked in this language so I decided not to mess with it yet. Coming from Java I have a blanket policy that every variable is final unless needed to be modified. I've run into those pain points. Your first observation is one I have some into as well but I haven't been taught how to do this. For example if my header file needs to define the method: void test(std::string something); Is it bad form to them define the header in my cpp file as such? void test(string something); Isn't that also bad form? Coming from C some things like this could be done but very much shouldn't have been done. I know for a fact that namespacing is one of the hugest benifits to large projects I just don't know how to use the tools provided by C++ to do it correctly. Java? Yea I can get anything you want nice and tucked away. But C++ with the way headers and namespacing works its difficult to obviously see what I want to do and how to get it done. Any examples?
- Koshkin 10y ago
  I agree. To truly learn and appreciate programming, you have to be able to enjoy it, first and foremost, and, unlike, say, Pascal, Python or JavaScript, the languages like Java, C, and especially C++ make that extremely hard for a novice programmer. This is because before you even begin to appreciate the ideas based on which those languages were designed and the languages' sophisticated features, you need to face the problems that these languages are trying to solve, and that takes time and programming experience. It may sound strange, but I find assembly to be an appropriate language to learn programming. Not only your focus will be on what you are doing rather than on the language itself, you will get a feeling of what is really going on, and you will quickly appreciate - and fully understand - the the reason why C is useful and that it is a good, well designed programming language. (In the same way, with enough experience using C, one comes to appreciate C++.)
- pjmlp 10y ago
  I was part of the C++ teaching group on CS labs on my university back in 1999. The majority of them surely were able to get shit done in C++ at the end of the semester.
  - _yosefk 10y ago
    Was it their first language though, and more generally, what did they already know? Don't get me wrong, I remember the people who taught me C++ rather fondly. It's just done really terribly really often.
- MichaelMoser123 10y ago
  > trying to understand what the fuck cout<<x actually does You can always do fprintf instead of that; i almost never do C++ streams for io - there is always a way to avoid them.
  - gravypod 10y ago
    I have also never seen a codebase that has used cout piping that was worth any salt. But then why is it the first thing we shove into peoples faces when teaching them the language?
    - MichaelMoser123 10y ago
      i think they want to make an impression: C++ is supposed to be a new language, and not just C with a class system + templates bolted on top of it. i guess streams is supposed to be the new way of doing IO, never mind the circular inheritance mess and virtual function calls for getting new data.
metaobject 10y ago
This problem is not limited to HN, I see it everywhere. And wrt to the notion that every feature of C++ (from simple, to complex, to highly complex) will be used, I've been using C++ professionally for ~13 years and there are certain features I've chosen to stay away from since they don't add any benefit to the problems that I solve (or to the way I solve them). And I feel fine about that bc I'm very pleased with the performance and abstractions I can create with C++.
- MereInterest 10y ago
  As somebody who is relatively experienced with C++, but primarily on small projects with few developers, which features do you tend to stay away from?
  - Koshkin 10y ago
    I found it helpful to think about (the modern) C++ as a combination of two languages: one is a relatively straightforward language for application development, almost on par with Java or scripting languages such as Python; the other is a very sophisticated tool for implementing universally useful, generic classes and libraries.
gravypod 10y ago
So my opinion on the difficulty of learning features in a language are not valid since I'm just learning the features? Bravo. My problem is not with what I think you are attributing to me but rather other issues with the language and tool chain. There seems to me very little that can be done in C++ that can't be done cleaner in C. It's evident that most people who use a language aren't going to have time to spend years becoming a master at it. They are going to join a team and say "So to do my assigned task I need to do X, what features let me to X the cleanest" and this is how I've taken on learning C++. Sadly, no features that are new have yielded themselves to any problem I've seen. I haven't encountered it. Your solution to rebut my argument is that "you need to be at least 10 years into the language to know anything kid!" yet you provide no rebuttal. Please do provide an argument not an insult at my age the next time you'd like to raise a disagreement with my ideas.
- tossaway1 10y ago
  Well you didn't express your criticism a the reason C++ is difficult to learn, you described it as "the problem with C++" and it sounds like you don't have enough familiarity with the language to make that sort of assessment. C++ isn't a great choice for many purposes, but for some purposes it is the go-to language - and for good reasons, not just because of inertia as some like to suggest. As with all forms of craftsmanship, you need to choose the right tool for what you're trying to accomplish.
  - gravypod 10y ago
    Here is why C++ is difficult to learn. It's like my experience of dealing with Java's inherited state except at every point in the language. For people who have never touched java's inherited state from extending abstracts or base classes please don't fall into the traps I did. I was writing a redundant networking library that was meant to load packets on the fly so I had some cleaver "c++ level" abstraction written out for it. It only made sense to me because I relied on horribly complex features of Java. I'd say the most complex feature of Java. Read through this to get an idea of what's going on. You'll notice that this is one of the sections with the least detail in the entire Java Primer thing. This is because in my opinion even the Java developers don't know all the rules. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/IandI/multipleinheritance.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/IandI/multiplei... Now I don't think I know these rules either. I spent 2 months sorting out this mess and ended up with a polished product. But guess what? I could never go back there and fix something "quick". I'd need to do a bit of reading, read through my source, experiment a bit. This is not productive nor good standards and because of this I try never to rely on inherited state in Java anymore. The same goes for every pain point of C++. Sure an expert, someone who lives, breaths, and dies by C++ might know exactly what is going on from the get go but that can't just be the assumption for every programmer. It is my opinion that if a language designer expects someone to read up on the language before going in and changing things they have failed at one of the cornerstones of language deign and implementation. Everything should be "of course" levels of ingenuity but in C++ everything is "what the fuck". For instance, please read my comment on RAII. You can also take the multiple inheritance problems I've had in Java and directly apply them to C++. You've also got strange behavior, when coming from C, for dealing with strings. For instance, where does an std::string get allocated? Is it on the heap or stack? For instance am I opening myself up to bugs by doing this in my latest CS lab? https://git.gravypod.com/gravypod/school/blob/master/cs280/homework/program_1/src/tokenizer.cpp#L28 https://git.gravypod.com/gravypod/school/blob/master/cs280/h... There's no apparent flow or rhyme to anything in this language. It just seems to be complexity bolted on simplicity and called "an industry standard". Also operator overloading. I'd say it's a great thing for defining numeric and mathematical constructs that actually implement the specific operators as you would expect. For instance speaking as someone who has implemented their own basic physics library in java that is a godsend. But why, in the name of god, would you ever think of using numeric operators on non-numeric constructs? That's just inconsistency again leading down the further train of C++ needing to be learning in full before used. Further, namespacing is taught poorly. I've had to do my own reading and settle on a standard that I think is semi-sane at least. Rather then using the entire std namespace the same as my class I've settled on specifying namespaced elements I want to use. This is not how anything is taught in any college I've examined. An example of what I do: https://git.gravypod.com/gravypod/school/blob/master/cs280/homework/program_1/src/tokenizer.hpp#L14-L16 https://git.gravypod.com/gravypod/school/blob/master/cs280/h... What's the point of using a namespace if you are just going to blanket import the entire namespace? Also if that's not the SOP for industry why is it taught as such in college? There are many many if-ands-and butts about C++ and I can't go into all of them as I don't know all of them. I do like reference types though, that's nice.

yosefk 10y ago

As someone who's had to deal with C++ since the last century, I find that one problem with C++ is that people who aren't experienced C++ programmers can't get shit done, especially in a code base where experienced C++ programmers have demonstrated their erudition and knowledge of C++ arcana in all its glory. In fact, the intersection of people who had the patience to learn enough C++ to get shit done and people who also have the patience or basic desire to actually get shit done (as opposed to programming wanky wrappers and stuff) is annoyingly small (this however is not true everywhere, I'd expect no such problem to exist with game programmers, for example.) The fact that a language is terrible for newcomers is a real problem, and a newcomer is a very good judge of that even if they aren't a very good judge of other aspects. Especially loathsome are those people who teach, say, undergraduates majoring in physics some C++ as a way to introduce them to programming. You might think that someone who manages to deal with the math needed to do physics would be able to absorb C++, and often you'd think wrong; one physics undergrad told an experienced programmer after trying to understand what the fuck cout<<x actually does, "your head is full of garbage!", by which he meant that the amount of completely arbitrary rules that you need to memorize was not something that dealing with math and science prepared him for. From the above I conclude that people who have a semester's worth of experience in C++ might not be C++ experts but they certainly know enough to burn the instructor who chose C++ in the first place at the stake.

sseagull 10y ago
> what the fuck cout<<x actually does I'm not sure where that conversation would go. It prints to stdout. Would the student say the same thing about printf("%d", x)? How far down the rabbit hole did he want to go? Stream insertion syntax os pretty bad, though, I'll agree with that. Especially when you want to print floating point.
- gravypod 10y ago
  The conversation then shifts to how it does this? What if I want to print to something else? Why if I want to read differently from a stream? When you provide a shorthand that's all well and good but when you TEACH a short hand it's what's ONLY used by the students. The students will assume there is no other way to read and write then using >> and << which is horribly incorrect. These are largely inadequate measures for reading and writing in my experience as you probably want to do formatting which printf just does better. So many of the students in my CS class this semester can't do the first lab, which in all essence, is a tokenizer because they don't know that there are other ways for writing to, or reading from, a stream! A short hand should only be used in a majority if it can do everything the long hand way can do. Also for anyone interested what my first C++ project looked like you can see here: https://web.njit.edu/~gwryan/CS280/CS280-Program-1-Fall-2016-R1.pdf https://web.njit.edu/~gwryan/CS280/CS280-Program-1-Fall-2016... https://git.gravypod.com/gravypod/school/tree/master/cs280/homework/program_1 https://git.gravypod.com/gravypod/school/tree/master/cs280/h... It's not my best work, but if any C++ people want to notify me of things I'm doing that's wrong I'm more then happy to learn.
  - sseagull 10y ago
    I will agree with the point that the other methods of reading/writing from streams aren't taught early enough, and that formatted output is pretty bad with streams. I've actually written a wrapper around snprintf for printing in c++ (I should put that on github sometime) Your project looks good. Two minor observations: 1.) You have 'using' statements in a header file. This is fine for a small project, but is considered bad form in larger projects (every file that includes that header will end up including the 'using' statements. This can cause collisions in large projects). 2.) Const correctness is a good habit to get into. (Ie, only pass non-const references if you are actually changing the object in the function)
    - gravypod 10y ago
      I wasn't sure how const worked in this language so I decided not to mess with it yet. Coming from Java I have a blanket policy that every variable is final unless needed to be modified. I've run into those pain points. Your first observation is one I have some into as well but I haven't been taught how to do this. For example if my header file needs to define the method: void test(std::string something); Is it bad form to them define the header in my cpp file as such? void test(string something); Isn't that also bad form? Coming from C some things like this could be done but very much shouldn't have been done. I know for a fact that namespacing is one of the hugest benifits to large projects I just don't know how to use the tools provided by C++ to do it correctly. Java? Yea I can get anything you want nice and tucked away. But C++ with the way headers and namespacing works its difficult to obviously see what I want to do and how to get it done. Any examples?
Koshkin 10y ago
I agree. To truly learn and appreciate programming, you have to be able to enjoy it, first and foremost, and, unlike, say, Pascal, Python or JavaScript, the languages like Java, C, and especially C++ make that extremely hard for a novice programmer. This is because before you even begin to appreciate the ideas based on which those languages were designed and the languages' sophisticated features, you need to face the problems that these languages are trying to solve, and that takes time and programming experience. It may sound strange, but I find assembly to be an appropriate language to learn programming. Not only your focus will be on what you are doing rather than on the language itself, you will get a feeling of what is really going on, and you will quickly appreciate - and fully understand - the the reason why C is useful and that it is a good, well designed programming language. (In the same way, with enough experience using C, one comes to appreciate C++.)
pjmlp 10y ago
I was part of the C++ teaching group on CS labs on my university back in 1999. The majority of them surely were able to get shit done in C++ at the end of the semester.
- _yosefk 10y ago
  Was it their first language though, and more generally, what did they already know? Don't get me wrong, I remember the people who taught me C++ rather fondly. It's just done really terribly really often.
MichaelMoser123 10y ago
> trying to understand what the fuck cout<<x actually does You can always do fprintf instead of that; i almost never do C++ streams for io - there is always a way to avoid them.
- gravypod 10y ago
  I have also never seen a codebase that has used cout piping that was worth any salt. But then why is it the first thing we shove into peoples faces when teaching them the language?
  - MichaelMoser123 10y ago
    i think they want to make an impression: C++ is supposed to be a new language, and not just C with a class system + templates bolted on top of it. i guess streams is supposed to be the new way of doing IO, never mind the circular inheritance mess and virtual function calls for getting new data.

metaobject 10y ago

This problem is not limited to HN, I see it everywhere. And wrt to the notion that every feature of C++ (from simple, to complex, to highly complex) will be used, I've been using C++ professionally for ~13 years and there are certain features I've chosen to stay away from since they don't add any benefit to the problems that I solve (or to the way I solve them). And I feel fine about that bc I'm very pleased with the performance and abstractions I can create with C++.

MereInterest 10y ago
As somebody who is relatively experienced with C++, but primarily on small projects with few developers, which features do you tend to stay away from?
- Koshkin 10y ago
  I found it helpful to think about (the modern) C++ as a combination of two languages: one is a relatively straightforward language for application development, almost on par with Java or scripting languages such as Python; the other is a very sophisticated tool for implementing universally useful, generic classes and libraries.

gravypod 10y ago

So my opinion on the difficulty of learning features in a language are not valid since I'm just learning the features? Bravo. My problem is not with what I think you are attributing to me but rather other issues with the language and tool chain. There seems to me very little that can be done in C++ that can't be done cleaner in C. It's evident that most people who use a language aren't going to have time to spend years becoming a master at it. They are going to join a team and say "So to do my assigned task I need to do X, what features let me to X the cleanest" and this is how I've taken on learning C++. Sadly, no features that are new have yielded themselves to any problem I've seen. I haven't encountered it. Your solution to rebut my argument is that "you need to be at least 10 years into the language to know anything kid!" yet you provide no rebuttal. Please do provide an argument not an insult at my age the next time you'd like to raise a disagreement with my ideas.

tossaway1 10y ago
Well you didn't express your criticism a the reason C++ is difficult to learn, you described it as "the problem with C++" and it sounds like you don't have enough familiarity with the language to make that sort of assessment. C++ isn't a great choice for many purposes, but for some purposes it is the go-to language - and for good reasons, not just because of inertia as some like to suggest. As with all forms of craftsmanship, you need to choose the right tool for what you're trying to accomplish.
- gravypod 10y ago
  Here is why C++ is difficult to learn. It's like my experience of dealing with Java's inherited state except at every point in the language. For people who have never touched java's inherited state from extending abstracts or base classes please don't fall into the traps I did. I was writing a redundant networking library that was meant to load packets on the fly so I had some cleaver "c++ level" abstraction written out for it. It only made sense to me because I relied on horribly complex features of Java. I'd say the most complex feature of Java. Read through this to get an idea of what's going on. You'll notice that this is one of the sections with the least detail in the entire Java Primer thing. This is because in my opinion even the Java developers don't know all the rules. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/IandI/multipleinheritance.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/IandI/multiplei... Now I don't think I know these rules either. I spent 2 months sorting out this mess and ended up with a polished product. But guess what? I could never go back there and fix something "quick". I'd need to do a bit of reading, read through my source, experiment a bit. This is not productive nor good standards and because of this I try never to rely on inherited state in Java anymore. The same goes for every pain point of C++. Sure an expert, someone who lives, breaths, and dies by C++ might know exactly what is going on from the get go but that can't just be the assumption for every programmer. It is my opinion that if a language designer expects someone to read up on the language before going in and changing things they have failed at one of the cornerstones of language deign and implementation. Everything should be "of course" levels of ingenuity but in C++ everything is "what the fuck". For instance, please read my comment on RAII. You can also take the multiple inheritance problems I've had in Java and directly apply them to C++. You've also got strange behavior, when coming from C, for dealing with strings. For instance, where does an std::string get allocated? Is it on the heap or stack? For instance am I opening myself up to bugs by doing this in my latest CS lab? https://git.gravypod.com/gravypod/school/blob/master/cs280/homework/program_1/src/tokenizer.cpp#L28 https://git.gravypod.com/gravypod/school/blob/master/cs280/h... There's no apparent flow or rhyme to anything in this language. It just seems to be complexity bolted on simplicity and called "an industry standard". Also operator overloading. I'd say it's a great thing for defining numeric and mathematical constructs that actually implement the specific operators as you would expect. For instance speaking as someone who has implemented their own basic physics library in java that is a godsend. But why, in the name of god, would you ever think of using numeric operators on non-numeric constructs? That's just inconsistency again leading down the further train of C++ needing to be learning in full before used. Further, namespacing is taught poorly. I've had to do my own reading and settle on a standard that I think is semi-sane at least. Rather then using the entire std namespace the same as my class I've settled on specifying namespaced elements I want to use. This is not how anything is taught in any college I've examined. An example of what I do: https://git.gravypod.com/gravypod/school/blob/master/cs280/homework/program_1/src/tokenizer.hpp#L14-L16 https://git.gravypod.com/gravypod/school/blob/master/cs280/h... What's the point of using a namespace if you are just going to blanket import the entire namespace? Also if that's not the SOP for industry why is it taught as such in college? There are many many if-ands-and butts about C++ and I can't go into all of them as I don't know all of them. I do like reference types though, that's nice.