> C++ is a pedagogically worthless language. It bogs a budding student down with historical baggage like header files and cryptic imports whilst drowning said s

> C++ is a pedagogically worthless language. It bogs a budding student down with historical baggage like header files and cryptic imports whilst drowning said student in the complexities of an abuse and archaic syntax, with nothing but an error message that’s as clear and useful as a lead-filled balloon used as a flotation device. It’s impossible to get a pleasing, mathematically-sound model of your domain in C++. Heck, you can’t even model something in an OO way whilst following the literature on that. Almost all effort is consumed in attempting to appease a persnickety compiler. You may not learn "programming" this way, but all of these are going to be useful skills when you work as a programmer. > Since getting the syntax and the ceremony right is so much of C++, it turns into a guess-and-check game, where the student keeps tweaking things until it works. This is not the way. You don’t learn anything about why things are the way they are. This is similar to one argument I’ve heard about how Java suffers from a similar problem. We shouldn’t be teaching students how to solve programs in a given language. Rather, we should be giving them tools to think about the problems they face and how to solve them. And here's the part where you learn to deal with office politics. I guess my point is that I'm a bit skeptical about "good learning techniques" when there isn't any data to back it up and just the reasoning of the author. All of this "feels" true to me, in a way that "let the students figure out C++" doesn't, but I don't know if this theory is true.