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> Some developers don’t want to learn C++ properly I do get your point but now you are kind of losing nuance. As engineers we also have to be able to answer th

> Some developers don’t want to learn C++ properly I do get your point but now you are kind of losing nuance. As engineers we also have to be able to answer the questions: "Is it really worth continuing to sink time and energy into technology X? Would it really give me increased productivity? Would it reduce runtime bugs? Would the return of investment be a favorable coefficient?" So yes, people actually stop and think about these things. What monsters indeed. The fallacy of "you have to know it perfectly to reject it" is tiring. If you want a technology to keep being used then maybe make it worth people's time. And I don't think language preference plays any measurable role in this; sure it exists but every serious engineer I've known just scoffs at syntax, myself included (whether I am a serious engineer or not, I make no claims). Syntax is something people constantly overplay as a factor and in reality I'd think at least 80% of all programmers get used to it in the first 2 - 8 weeks and then forget about it. To sum up, "learning C++ properly" is not a worthy endeavor and has not been in a long time. Of course people who only know that will reach for any other venues to attack the "youngsters" or whatever other ad hominem they prefer this week. That's known and well-understood, and hence their stance is obviously biased and as such is not a good starting discussion point.

josephg 2y ago
I agree re: syntax, but there’s sooo much more to be said about the differences between C++ and rust than syntax. There’s OO. The borrow checker vs smart pointers. Templates vs traits. Async. Philosophy around safety. And on and on. > To sum up, "learning C++ properly" is not a worthy endeavor and has not been in a long time. Even as someone who adores rust, this is where you lose me. The problem is that smart engineers disagree about whether rust and/or c++ is worth learning & using in 2024. I don’t think there’s any getting around that. You simply won’t convince a lot of C++ devs to like rust any more than you’ll convince many rust devs to learn & enjoy C++. The remaining question is what do you want to do about that? Would rust be good for the FreeBSD kernel? Are there enough rust devs around in the FreeBSD community to justify making rust a first class citizen in the base system?
- pdimitar 2y ago
  [flagged]
- tialaramex 2y ago
  C++ is an enormous sprawling mess. Thousands of pages of English written over many decades by dozens of authors trying to describe an imaginary "standard" programming language. It seems unlikely that in the short to medium term it will stop getting worse. C++ 26 probably (depending on committee decisions over the next few months) adds compile time reflection to the language and also a contracts mechanism, both of which interact with numerous existing parts of the language and further increase its overall complexity. Nothing of comparable significance is to be removed. The "experts" choose to specialise. They learn a lot about some key topic (e.g. the algorithms library), and a few things about related topics, and maybe they know which other experts to consult with when there's overlap, and that's it. So it's not likely that "learning C++ properly" is even possible for humans today unless you choose to define "properly" not to include a comprehensive understanding of the language but only some loose standard like "Know enough C++ to read this particular codebase".
  - blub 2y ago
    Let's take the thousands of pages of English claim. Only the latest C++23 standard barely pushes over 2000 pages. The core language is described in about 500 pages, while the rest is taken up by the specification of the library. * First of all, having a specification and an ISO standard is good, because it doesn't allow powerful actors like e.g. Google to take the language in whichever direction they want and in a huge ecosystem of compilers, platforms, SoCs, etc gives one a certain amount of certainty on what to expect. But fine, let's talk again in 10 or 20 years and see how non-standardised Rust's doing. * Second of all, no developer will ever learn the language from the standard document. This is something for compiler writers or developers that need to understand the standardese in very specific cases. A regular developer will learn based on a series of books (such as Josuttis, Meyers and Stroustrup - personally I also like Bancila), then check their assumptions on cppreference! What the experts do is irrelevant for the average developer, because the great majority of us aren't experts in a language, nor do we want to be. It's a tool, not a purpose in life. * Thirdly, one doesn't have to learn the language comprehensively to be productive, indeed this is not how many developers learn, because they must often learn several languages and therefore satisfice. Yes, there's developers that prefer to go deep, like me, but based on what I read online and have seen in real life, that's the exception. And even I don't go as deep as learning the standard by heart, that's a waste of time when there's so much actually useful domain knowledge to acquire. That being said, C++ is growing too much and too fast and is too complex. At some point I'd like to be "done" with learning the same language, but Rust and C++ are like a never-ending journey. That's why many developers wisely skip both and why I prefer to invest my time in Python and Go instead of CPP-but-with-memory-safety.

josephg 2y ago

I agree re: syntax, but there’s sooo much more to be said about the differences between C++ and rust than syntax. There’s OO. The borrow checker vs smart pointers. Templates vs traits. Async. Philosophy around safety. And on and on. > To sum up, "learning C++ properly" is not a worthy endeavor and has not been in a long time. Even as someone who adores rust, this is where you lose me. The problem is that smart engineers disagree about whether rust and/or c++ is worth learning & using in 2024. I don’t think there’s any getting around that. You simply won’t convince a lot of C++ devs to like rust any more than you’ll convince many rust devs to learn & enjoy C++. The remaining question is what do you want to do about that? Would rust be good for the FreeBSD kernel? Are there enough rust devs around in the FreeBSD community to justify making rust a first class citizen in the base system?

pdimitar 2y ago
[flagged]
tialaramex 2y ago
C++ is an enormous sprawling mess. Thousands of pages of English written over many decades by dozens of authors trying to describe an imaginary "standard" programming language. It seems unlikely that in the short to medium term it will stop getting worse. C++ 26 probably (depending on committee decisions over the next few months) adds compile time reflection to the language and also a contracts mechanism, both of which interact with numerous existing parts of the language and further increase its overall complexity. Nothing of comparable significance is to be removed. The "experts" choose to specialise. They learn a lot about some key topic (e.g. the algorithms library), and a few things about related topics, and maybe they know which other experts to consult with when there's overlap, and that's it. So it's not likely that "learning C++ properly" is even possible for humans today unless you choose to define "properly" not to include a comprehensive understanding of the language but only some loose standard like "Know enough C++ to read this particular codebase".
- blub 2y ago
  Let's take the thousands of pages of English claim. Only the latest C++23 standard barely pushes over 2000 pages. The core language is described in about 500 pages, while the rest is taken up by the specification of the library. * First of all, having a specification and an ISO standard is good, because it doesn't allow powerful actors like e.g. Google to take the language in whichever direction they want and in a huge ecosystem of compilers, platforms, SoCs, etc gives one a certain amount of certainty on what to expect. But fine, let's talk again in 10 or 20 years and see how non-standardised Rust's doing. * Second of all, no developer will ever learn the language from the standard document. This is something for compiler writers or developers that need to understand the standardese in very specific cases. A regular developer will learn based on a series of books (such as Josuttis, Meyers and Stroustrup - personally I also like Bancila), then check their assumptions on cppreference! What the experts do is irrelevant for the average developer, because the great majority of us aren't experts in a language, nor do we want to be. It's a tool, not a purpose in life. * Thirdly, one doesn't have to learn the language comprehensively to be productive, indeed this is not how many developers learn, because they must often learn several languages and therefore satisfice. Yes, there's developers that prefer to go deep, like me, but based on what I read online and have seen in real life, that's the exception. And even I don't go as deep as learning the standard by heart, that's a waste of time when there's so much actually useful domain knowledge to acquire. That being said, C++ is growing too much and too fast and is too complex. At some point I'd like to be "done" with learning the same language, but Rust and C++ are like a never-ending journey. That's why many developers wisely skip both and why I prefer to invest my time in Python and Go instead of CPP-but-with-memory-safety.