A few years ago I tried out VC++ version 4 (??) for a bit of a laugh. And I felt no wonder as to why C++ got such a bad wrap. The MFC classes seemed to have suf

A few years ago I tried out VC++ version 4 (??) for a bit of a laugh. And I felt no wonder as to why C++ got such a bad wrap. The MFC classes seemed to have suffered from gold-plating the specifications, and there was all sorts of casting stuff to cajole C++ into interfacing with the C windowing system. Since then, C++ has gotten massively better. We now have strings and vectors as part of the standard library, so there's no need to use someone's quirky implementation. As I said in a previous post, C++ gets you most of the way to Python, so there's really no point in not using it. Still, it's taken us until C++17 to get sum-types (via variants), and it is amazing to think that it took so long to get such a basic idea included. The handling of variants could do with a bit of simplification, mind. And I'd do wish they could implement the equivalent of "typeclasses", enabling recursive data structures. I'm a big C++ fan, in case that wasn't clear.