> C++ has drifted off into some fantasy world I like what E. W. Dijkstra had to say in "The Humble Programmer": > Finally, although the subject is not a pleas

> C++ has drifted off into some fantasy world I like what E. W. Dijkstra had to say in "The Humble Programmer": > Finally, although the subject is not a pleasant one, I must mention C++, a programming language for which the defining documentation is of a frightening size and complexity. Using C++ must be like flying a plane with 7000 buttons, switches and handles to manipulate in the cockpit. I absolutely fail to see how we can keep our growing programs firmly within our intellectual grip when by its sheer baroqueness the programming language —our basic tool, mind you!— already escapes our intellectual control. And if I have to describe the influence C++ can have on its users, the closest metaphor that comes to my mind is that of a drug. I remember from a symposium on higher level programming language a lecture given in defense of C++ by a man who described himself as one of its devoted users. But within a one-hour lecture in praise of C++. he managed to ask for the addition of about fifty new “features”, little supposing that the main source of his problems could very well be that it contained already far too many “features”. The speaker displayed all the depressing symptoms of addiction, reduced as he was to the state of mental stagnation in which he could only ask for more, more, more... When FORTRAN has been called an infantile disorder, full C++, with its growth characteristics of a dangerous tumor, could turn out to be a fatal disease. April fool's. He actually said that about PL/1 [1]. [1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340...