C++ here reminds me of Perl, the postmodern language. There are tradeoffs between legibility and power, but never for the sake of safety or artificial consisten

C++ here reminds me of Perl, the postmodern language. There are tradeoffs between legibility and power, but never for the sake of safety or artificial consistency. "How does Perl [C++] put the focus onto the creativity of the programmer? Very simple. Perl [C++] is humble. It doesn't try to tell the programmer how to program. It lets the programmer decide what rules today, and what sucks. It doesn't have any theoretical axes to grind. And where it has theoretical axes, it doesn't grind them. Perl [C++] doesn't have any agenda at all, other than to be maximally useful to the maximal number of people. ... Many modern computer languages aspire to be minimalistic. They either succeed in being minimalistic, in which case they're relatively useless, or they don't succeed in being truly minimalistic, in which case you can actually solve real problems with them. A number of languages give lip service to the idea of minimalism, but merely sweep the complexity of the problem under the carpet of the programmer. C is a minimalistic language, but only if you don't count all the libraries that are necessary to use it usefully. C++ is obviously not trying to be minimalistic. Unix is considered by some to be a minimalistic operating system, but the fact of the matter is that if you think of Unix as a programming language, it's far richer than even Perl. Perl is, by and large, a digested and simplified version of Unix. Perl is the Cliff Notes of Unix." http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html