A huge reason people teach C/++ to beginners is to understand how the "machine" works. Yes, the model C++ uses doesn't map too well to modern assemblies, and ye

A huge reason people teach C/++ to beginners is to understand how the "machine" works. Yes, the model C++ uses doesn't map too well to modern assemblies, and yes, it maps even worse to the actual hardware, but its abstraction is the one everyone uses, so it's worth teaching. Teaching modern C++ doesn't do that, at all. "Modern" C++ even has garbage collection (reference counting) in the form of shared_ptr! The author makes the good point that C is much better suited to this job than C++. Also, standards definitely shouldn't be inscrutable to programmers. Look at the ECMAScript and Go specifications, they're clear as day. Sometimes you just need to know exactly what your code is doing, and this only becomes more important in the low-level scenarios that C++ is often used for. I haven't read the C++ specification, but if it's as hard to read as everyone says it is, then there needs to be some other way to understand exactly what's going on. How else am I meant to precisely understand how my structs will be laid out, or which casts are guaranteed to be valid, or whether the language allows data pointers and function pointers to be interchangeable?