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Memory management. I think this makes it about twice as difficult to get up and running in c++. Not saying it's better or worse or going to make you a better p

Memory management. I think this makes it about twice as difficult to get up and running in c++. Not saying it's better or worse or going to make you a better programmer or not, but I don't think anyone could argue that it's easier to learn C++ than python/ruby/php/etc. Also see: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000006.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000006.html

guelo 16y ago
Twice as difficult? Not likely. There are 14 year old kids making million dollar apps using Objective C and managing the memory. It's not that hard, you just have to learn a few rules. I'm not saying you'll be an expert but you should be able to start fixing simple bugs in an open source C++ project within a month unless you were born without that part of the brain, as Joel says.
- Jabbles 16y ago
  I think you have an unrealistic view of 14 year olds. Just because 1 in 100,000,000 can do this does not mean C++ is as good a language for a beginner as Python.
jrockway 16y ago
I'm going to agree here. C++ is the first language I really did anything with (a sierpinski-trinagle generator for KDE, when I was in 7th grade) and simply didn't understand, at the time, what the memory-related issues were. I allocated stuff, and it worked. I returned pointers to the stack, and the code worked. Sometimes I got segfaults, but if I changed the code a bit, they went away. This is not the sort of understanding you want people you're paying to write software to have. (And yes, I do see this from time to time. "Do you know anything about programming!?" "Yes, just enough to be dangerous.")
tbrownaw 16y ago
But C++ doesn't require you to know memory management or use pointers, those are all wrapped up in the STL containers. Those can be towards the later part of the learning curve, rather than at the beginning.

guelo 16y ago

Twice as difficult? Not likely. There are 14 year old kids making million dollar apps using Objective C and managing the memory. It's not that hard, you just have to learn a few rules. I'm not saying you'll be an expert but you should be able to start fixing simple bugs in an open source C++ project within a month unless you were born without that part of the brain, as Joel says.

Jabbles 16y ago
I think you have an unrealistic view of 14 year olds. Just because 1 in 100,000,000 can do this does not mean C++ is as good a language for a beginner as Python.

jrockway 16y ago

I'm going to agree here. C++ is the first language I really did anything with (a sierpinski-trinagle generator for KDE, when I was in 7th grade) and simply didn't understand, at the time, what the memory-related issues were. I allocated stuff, and it worked. I returned pointers to the stack, and the code worked. Sometimes I got segfaults, but if I changed the code a bit, they went away. This is not the sort of understanding you want people you're paying to write software to have. (And yes, I do see this from time to time. "Do you know anything about programming!?" "Yes, just enough to be dangerous.")

tbrownaw 16y ago

But C++ doesn't require you to know memory management or use pointers, those are all wrapped up in the STL containers. Those can be towards the later part of the learning curve, rather than at the beginning.