4 ms·

I've always thought of C++ as the most complex programming language I know. With each revision it becomes more complex. I gave up and just moved on to Rust a ye

by eloff 4y ago

I've always thought of C++ as the most complex programming language I know. With each revision it becomes more complex. I gave up and just moved on to Rust a year and a half ago. I have no regrets. C++ has not quite joined Perl, PHP, and Java as languages I will not work with anymore, but it's the next logical candidate.

spoiler 4y ago
I've not worked with PHP for over 8 years now, but I hear it's gotten much better recently. It still has issues that are commonly associated with hosting provider configuration/control over the runtime, apparently. (sources are anecdotal; two friends who've had the mental fortitude to stick with the language for so long)
- jmt_ 4y ago
  PHP 7 & 8 introduce lots of improvements. I used PHP 5 when I got into web dev and remember moving to Python as soon as I could. At work I've had to use PHP 7 and have been very pleasantly surprised at how solid it is. Now that I have more experience than my PHP 5 days, it's become apparent that PHP is very clearly suited for web work and the built-in functions offer many conveniences for such work that simply aren't available in other languages (granted other languages weren't built for web like PHP was). I've been surprised by my speed in PHP and I chalk most of that up to many helpful standard library functions. Even though PHP has a lot of old/compat functions still present I'm always surprised by how little that actually ends up effecting my productivity. So it's not my choice for greenfield projects but I'm not nearly as adverse to it now after working with modern day PHP for a bit.
  - jamesfinlayson 4y ago
    Agreed - I've worked on a few PHP 5 era projects with hand-rolled frameworks and more recently I've worked on a few PHP 7/PHP 8 projects using proper frameworks and it's night and day.
tasubotadas 4y ago
No idea why you decided to lump Java together with these abonimations. Java by itself is an extremely simple language.
- eloff 4y ago
  In theory Java is not so bad. I just have never enjoyed working with it or with the code Java developers end up creating. Kotlin is reasonably pleasant. I've sometimes used it when the JVM was a hard requirement.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Java is like one of those ice berg memes with a lot of byzantine JVM shit lurking at the depths.
- tonyarkles 4y ago
  For me, one of the biggest problems with Java is its simplicity. Because of the lack of "power tools", you end up with things like dynamically assemble class instances using either XML or magic (see Spring), and adding functions at compile time (see Lombok). The last time I worked on a Java project, it was practically impossible to predict how the system would actually behave at run-time; my joke was that a lot of these tools took issues that could have been detected at compile-time and instead converted them into run-time errors.
  - renewedrebecca 4y ago
    I've worked just about every day with Java for the past 22 years, and you've hit the nail on the head with the problems. I really prefer environments where you could start with main() and figure out the behavior from there, and things like Spring make that impossible. Really, if java only had lambdas and lisp-y macros from the beginning, we wouldn't have these problems.
    - bheadmaster 4y ago
      > I really prefer environments where you could start with main() and figure out the behavior from there This is one property of Go that I really like. Because of lack of constructors/destructors/magic functions and all that jazz, the only functions executed in a Go program are functions explicitly called through main().
bugfix-66 4y ago
I used C++ full-time for more than a decade before finally abandoning it in disgust. Now I use Go for most purposes, and C or CUDA when appropriate. Good riddance.
thrown_22 4y ago
This is what annoys me when people say C/C++. C++ is a mess that no one could ever learn. C is a happy little language that lets you move memory around in anything from a micro-controller to a GPU cluster. C is not getting replaced by Rust because Rust can't fit in most of the places C lives. C++ on the other hand can't die fast enough.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  Don't overestimate how big Rust needs to be, for a lot of specialist micro controllers the inertia is with C because the vendor ships a C SDK. But those SDKs are often garbage, which means if one or two enthusiasts make a good Rust SDK for your preferred controller suddenly Rust has the upper hand. For really tiny stuff Rust won't go there. If you program an 8051 clone, Rust isn't interested in your problem, ideas like "generic programming" and "pattern matching" don't make a whole lot of sense when only 128 bytes of RAM is accessible. But is C really the right tool for that environment either ? Once you've got 64kB of RAM, that's definitely potential Rust territory.

by eloff 4y ago

spoiler 4y ago

I've not worked with PHP for over 8 years now, but I hear it's gotten much better recently. It still has issues that are commonly associated with hosting provider configuration/control over the runtime, apparently. (sources are anecdotal; two friends who've had the mental fortitude to stick with the language for so long)

jmt_ 4y ago
PHP 7 & 8 introduce lots of improvements. I used PHP 5 when I got into web dev and remember moving to Python as soon as I could. At work I've had to use PHP 7 and have been very pleasantly surprised at how solid it is. Now that I have more experience than my PHP 5 days, it's become apparent that PHP is very clearly suited for web work and the built-in functions offer many conveniences for such work that simply aren't available in other languages (granted other languages weren't built for web like PHP was). I've been surprised by my speed in PHP and I chalk most of that up to many helpful standard library functions. Even though PHP has a lot of old/compat functions still present I'm always surprised by how little that actually ends up effecting my productivity. So it's not my choice for greenfield projects but I'm not nearly as adverse to it now after working with modern day PHP for a bit.
- jamesfinlayson 4y ago
  Agreed - I've worked on a few PHP 5 era projects with hand-rolled frameworks and more recently I've worked on a few PHP 7/PHP 8 projects using proper frameworks and it's night and day.

tasubotadas 4y ago

No idea why you decided to lump Java together with these abonimations. Java by itself is an extremely simple language.

eloff 4y ago
In theory Java is not so bad. I just have never enjoyed working with it or with the code Java developers end up creating. Kotlin is reasonably pleasant. I've sometimes used it when the JVM was a hard requirement.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
Java is like one of those ice berg memes with a lot of byzantine JVM shit lurking at the depths.
tonyarkles 4y ago
For me, one of the biggest problems with Java is its simplicity. Because of the lack of "power tools", you end up with things like dynamically assemble class instances using either XML or magic (see Spring), and adding functions at compile time (see Lombok). The last time I worked on a Java project, it was practically impossible to predict how the system would actually behave at run-time; my joke was that a lot of these tools took issues that could have been detected at compile-time and instead converted them into run-time errors.
- renewedrebecca 4y ago
  I've worked just about every day with Java for the past 22 years, and you've hit the nail on the head with the problems. I really prefer environments where you could start with main() and figure out the behavior from there, and things like Spring make that impossible. Really, if java only had lambdas and lisp-y macros from the beginning, we wouldn't have these problems.
  - bheadmaster 4y ago
    > I really prefer environments where you could start with main() and figure out the behavior from there This is one property of Go that I really like. Because of lack of constructors/destructors/magic functions and all that jazz, the only functions executed in a Go program are functions explicitly called through main().

bugfix-66 4y ago

I used C++ full-time for more than a decade before finally abandoning it in disgust. Now I use Go for most purposes, and C or CUDA when appropriate. Good riddance.

thrown_22 4y ago

This is what annoys me when people say C/C++. C++ is a mess that no one could ever learn. C is a happy little language that lets you move memory around in anything from a micro-controller to a GPU cluster. C is not getting replaced by Rust because Rust can't fit in most of the places C lives. C++ on the other hand can't die fast enough.

tialaramex 4y ago
Don't overestimate how big Rust needs to be, for a lot of specialist micro controllers the inertia is with C because the vendor ships a C SDK. But those SDKs are often garbage, which means if one or two enthusiasts make a good Rust SDK for your preferred controller suddenly Rust has the upper hand. For really tiny stuff Rust won't go there. If you program an 8051 clone, Rust isn't interested in your problem, ideas like "generic programming" and "pattern matching" don't make a whole lot of sense when only 128 bytes of RAM is accessible. But is C really the right tool for that environment either ? Once you've got 64kB of RAM, that's definitely potential Rust territory.