> C++ Is An Absolute Blast No, it's one of the worst languages I ever used. Tons of footguns and bad design choices everywhere. Too much cognitive load for les

> C++ Is An Absolute Blast No, it's one of the worst languages I ever used. Tons of footguns and bad design choices everywhere. Too much cognitive load for less benefit than other languages. I'm surprised the article didn't mention <iostream>. The f.fail(), f.eof(), f.flags() are confusing and verbose. Even something as simple as f.read() doesn't return the number of elements read, so you need to make a separate call to f.gcount(). And then there are all the opaque types like std::streamsize, std::mbstate_t, etc., where you have no idea how their sizes relate to language types like int/long/etc. or fixed-width types like int32_t/uint64_t/etc. https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/string/char_traits https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/string/char_traits And then there are the redundancies. int x = 0; int x(0); int x{0}; all roughly do the same things but have subtle differences in more advanced use cases. This recent thread ( https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/294784/c20-robust-file-interface https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/294784/c20-ro... ) reminded me that `typedef` got replaced by `using`. A while ago, I came up with a long list of near-duplicate features: https://www.nayuki.io/page/near-duplicate-features-of-cplusplus https://www.nayuki.io/page/near-duplicate-features-of-cplusp... > JavaScript still can't even figure out what a for-loop is ECMAScript 6 added the for-of loop, which is the more useful alternative to the for-in loop. > C++ has lambda, and it's not bullshit like Python's lambda C++ lambdas have a heavier syntax than any other lambda I know of (e.g. Python, Java, JavaScript, Haskell, Rust), because it needs to specify attributes and captures. https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/lambda https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/lambda > My thinking is C++ is now about as good as any other language out there Not by a longshot. Instead of C++, I reach for Java if I want fast design time, safe operations, and a more limited set of tools (e.g. not needing to decide how many layers of pointer indirection I want). I reach for Rust if I want the power of C++ without its footguns. Heck, my motto for Rust has always been, "C++ done right". Every time I compare analogous features in C++ and Rust, I find that the Rust version is much better designed. As the simplest example, in Rust it's a compile-time error to use a variable whose value is moved out, whereas in C++ the variable is still usable but has an invalid value. Another example is that Rust has traits but C++ relies on instantiating templates and then "duck-typing" to see if the resulting code can actually compile. And let's not forget nullptr, the trillion-dollar mistake - C++ makes nullptr implicitly part of every pointer(*) type, but Rust bans it by default unless you opt in with Option<T>. Rust has other quality-of-life features such as easily declared tuple types, the unit type instead of void (which makes functional programming easier as you don't have to special-case void), pattern matching and unpacking, methods on primitive types (e.g. 456u32.isqrt() instead of sqrt(456)). I just can't look at C++ seriously when Rust is miles ahead, being more expressive and safer. > The Amazing Comeback of C++11 I will agree with this in a limited sense When I write C++ code (because I'm a masochist), I will not tolerate anything less than C++11, because C++03 and C++98 are much, much worse. I'm talking about things like various types, standard library classes/functions, unique_ptr, and move semantics.