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There is easy mode. It is called C. I am not trying to be flippant. A lot of people started in C++, writing essentially C code and then going to classes, inheri

There is easy mode. It is called C. I am not trying to be flippant. A lot of people started in C++, writing essentially C code and then going to classes, inheritance, templates, wider usage of standard library and boost, little by little.

dahart 9y ago
I’d agree with that, and I’ve done lots of object oriented C. But fwiw, that’s not quite what I meant. You can’t get away from pointers in C, and easy mode should be as pointerless / loopless / functional as possible, like what STL is doing now but simpler and even less verbose. Arduino style C is super fun though...
bitwize 9y ago
But you're not supposed to program that way in C++ at all. Ask a veteran C++ programmer, and they'll tell you that buck n00bs should start out using the STL, smart pointers, and generic algorithms, make sparing use of inheritance, and never touch bare pointers.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  This former buck noob took about three months to get to that exact place, because C++ is literally a messy archaeology of random CS ideas, and the guiding philosophy seems to “shovel these funky features in, maybe someone will use them.” Beginner books meanwhile will be five, ten, or fifteen years out of date, and reliably give you a correspondingly wrong view of current best practices. At this point C++ is almost an oral tradition. You need someone who knows what they’re doing to tell you which books to read and which parts of the language to ignore. It’s horrendously difficult to learn if you do the usual thing and try to self-teach - and needlessly so, because the core of the language isn’t that complex.
eadmund 9y ago
C's not really easy mode, either. When I look at all the Unix utilities written in C, I want to weep, because it made things like buffer flows & other security flaws such attractive nuisances. C is easier than C++, certainly, but it's still a pretty rotten language to actually write code in. And I write that as someone whose second language was C, and who loved C with a passion, for many many years. I didn't realise how much I was fighting the language, and I didn't realise how much in any C program the trees of incredibly verbose C-isms obscured the forest of what I was actually trying to do.

dahart 9y ago

I’d agree with that, and I’ve done lots of object oriented C. But fwiw, that’s not quite what I meant. You can’t get away from pointers in C, and easy mode should be as pointerless / loopless / functional as possible, like what STL is doing now but simpler and even less verbose. Arduino style C is super fun though...

bitwize 9y ago

But you're not supposed to program that way in C++ at all. Ask a veteran C++ programmer, and they'll tell you that buck n00bs should start out using the STL, smart pointers, and generic algorithms, make sparing use of inheritance, and never touch bare pointers.

TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
This former buck noob took about three months to get to that exact place, because C++ is literally a messy archaeology of random CS ideas, and the guiding philosophy seems to “shovel these funky features in, maybe someone will use them.” Beginner books meanwhile will be five, ten, or fifteen years out of date, and reliably give you a correspondingly wrong view of current best practices. At this point C++ is almost an oral tradition. You need someone who knows what they’re doing to tell you which books to read and which parts of the language to ignore. It’s horrendously difficult to learn if you do the usual thing and try to self-teach - and needlessly so, because the core of the language isn’t that complex.

eadmund 9y ago

C's not really easy mode, either. When I look at all the Unix utilities written in C, I want to weep, because it made things like buffer flows & other security flaws such attractive nuisances. C is easier than C++, certainly, but it's still a pretty rotten language to actually write code in. And I write that as someone whose second language was C, and who loved C with a passion, for many many years. I didn't realise how much I was fighting the language, and I didn't realise how much in any C program the trees of incredibly verbose C-isms obscured the forest of what I was actually trying to do.