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I am both a Python programmer and a C++ programmer. I have programmed professionally full time in one or the other for years at a time. I think C++ is now a muc

by mianos 7y ago

I am both a Python programmer and a C++ programmer. I have programmed professionally full time in one or the other for years at a time. I think C++ is now a much better language than when I learnt it first (cfront). In particular C++11 really fixed a lot of the memory issues with shared_ptr and std:: algorithms. It is a better language now if you are doing anything larger than then a program that takes more than a few weeks to write. On the other hand, I love python for everything else and some of the new stuff is great but making a new way to print strings over and over tells me some people have too much spare time or not enough real work to do. In my opinion formatting a string to print a debug statement should be as concise as possible whereas a lot of these fancier formatting systems are better suited to stuff that ends up staying for use by other people. Luckily there are ways to use ye olde printf style formatters in both for those times.

59nadir 7y ago
C++ might be "better" now (I doubt it, to be honest, it just has more features that try to fix the issue at hand; that you're using C++), but it will never, ever get simpler or simple enough. They'd have to remove something like 75% of the language to end up with something that approaches simplicity and even then there are languages that would undoubtedly do those remaining 25% much better. I stopped writing C++ at some point in 2008/2009 but I still keep track of it to some extent and I'm continually surprised by the nonsense that is introduced into the language. The whole RAII movement, for example, is just one massive band-aid on top of the previous mistake of allowing exceptions, etc.. It'd be mostly fine in the long run, but you have all these people using like 15% of C++ and complain about it all day long, making their libraries not usable from stuff that understands C (most of which have drastically improved on the whole paradigm). There's a solution here and it's not using whichever arbitrary percentage you've decided on of C++, it's realizing that there are way better languages with real interoperability in mind to talk about lower-level things.

by mianos 7y ago

59nadir 7y ago

C++ might be "better" now (I doubt it, to be honest, it just has more features that try to fix the issue at hand; that you're using C++), but it will never, ever get simpler or simple enough. They'd have to remove something like 75% of the language to end up with something that approaches simplicity and even then there are languages that would undoubtedly do those remaining 25% much better. I stopped writing C++ at some point in 2008/2009 but I still keep track of it to some extent and I'm continually surprised by the nonsense that is introduced into the language. The whole RAII movement, for example, is just one massive band-aid on top of the previous mistake of allowing exceptions, etc.. It'd be mostly fine in the long run, but you have all these people using like 15% of C++ and complain about it all day long, making their libraries not usable from stuff that understands C (most of which have drastically improved on the whole paradigm). There's a solution here and it's not using whichever arbitrary percentage you've decided on of C++, it's realizing that there are way better languages with real interoperability in mind to talk about lower-level things.