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Author here--some extra context to add: The post was mostly written to point my students to, so I don't have to keep repeating myself. I get a not-insignifican

Author here--some extra context to add: The post was mostly written to point my students to, so I don't have to keep repeating myself. I get a not-insignificant number of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd years (in a 5-year program) believing C is some antiquated language and believing that they're getting held back in some way by learning C vs C++. One even suggested the department was incompetent for not teaching C++. Because I work in an engineering department, many students have not had a great deal of time learning programming fundamentals early on and regardless, they are eager to learn more advanced tools than they are ready to use. It is a bit rambling for the purpose--I have a tendency to...erm, overwhelm...with information to make my point. I haven't blogged much so I originally submitted it at lobste.rs[1] for any advice on the writing and visual style of the site. I welcome any constructive feedback. E.g. "I hate that side-nav! It keeps popping in and out!" Also to clarify, I am not anti-C++ is anyway. I am a firm practitioner of Chesterton's fence[2] and believe in nuance. That cuts both ways. C++ is the way it is because it filled a specific need. It's greatest flaw is trying to appease everyone and, recently, trying to catch up quickly to recent QoL features in other languages. This fortunately gives it a lot of features other languages don't have, and it unfortunately gives it a lot of features other languages don't have. Once again, the greater point being a warning, that C++ can easily become a time sink in language-specific knowledge instead of domain-specific knowledge. Of course sometimes that's what you want, e.g. when trying to optimize for performance. [1]: https://lobste.rs/s/tul188/initialization_c_is_seriously_bonkers https://lobste.rs/s/tul188/initialization_c_is_seriously_bon... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

gamma-male 8y ago
Why not teach rust?
- MikeLui 8y ago
  I can think of at least 3 reasons! 1) I don’t control the curriculum. 2) I’m pretty sure no one knows it well enough to teach. 3) Rust’s ecosystem and adoption is still too small for being taught as an engineering tool and for delivering employment opportunities to students. I personally like rust and hope it does well. I see it somewhat orthogonal to both C and C++
  - gamma-male 8y ago
    I’m pretty sure it’s not orthogonal. The goal is to replace both of these languages in the next 10+ years.
    - MikeLui 8y ago
      I understand Rust's goal is to have the zero-cost abstractions of C and C++ with greater safety, effectively displacing them. This is obviously a personal opinion, but sometimes I like being able to create bugs in my code. Not from an industrial or business standpoint, but from a greater understanding POV. It's easier to reason about the underlying machine (yes, yes I know C/C++ models abstract machines) when I can actually break that machine with the tools at hand. There's unsafe Rust which I have not looked at, but in terms of getting my hands dirty, sometimes C/C++ just feels better. The primitiveness, even of template programming vs Haskell's typeclasses, or constexpr vs D's CTFE. Something about that raw primitiveness is attractive. This is absolutely positively probably just experience bias. I'm not sure if anyone else can relate to this. So in that regard, I see Rust as orthogonal. If you want that feeling like, "hey, I'm just directly fiddling raw virtual memory addresses", that's not Rust's target. Rust markets itself as a safe language that hides all those bits by default.

gamma-male 8y ago

Why not teach rust?

MikeLui 8y ago
I can think of at least 3 reasons! 1) I don’t control the curriculum. 2) I’m pretty sure no one knows it well enough to teach. 3) Rust’s ecosystem and adoption is still too small for being taught as an engineering tool and for delivering employment opportunities to students. I personally like rust and hope it does well. I see it somewhat orthogonal to both C and C++
- gamma-male 8y ago
  I’m pretty sure it’s not orthogonal. The goal is to replace both of these languages in the next 10+ years.
  - MikeLui 8y ago
    I understand Rust's goal is to have the zero-cost abstractions of C and C++ with greater safety, effectively displacing them. This is obviously a personal opinion, but sometimes I like being able to create bugs in my code. Not from an industrial or business standpoint, but from a greater understanding POV. It's easier to reason about the underlying machine (yes, yes I know C/C++ models abstract machines) when I can actually break that machine with the tools at hand. There's unsafe Rust which I have not looked at, but in terms of getting my hands dirty, sometimes C/C++ just feels better. The primitiveness, even of template programming vs Haskell's typeclasses, or constexpr vs D's CTFE. Something about that raw primitiveness is attractive. This is absolutely positively probably just experience bias. I'm not sure if anyone else can relate to this. So in that regard, I see Rust as orthogonal. If you want that feeling like, "hey, I'm just directly fiddling raw virtual memory addresses", that's not Rust's target. Rust markets itself as a safe language that hides all those bits by default.