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I did not initially see the 'intro' in the title and it took me a while to understand why the author put so much energy on this (relatively) questionable aspect

I did not initially see the 'intro' in the title and it took me a while to understand why the author put so much energy on this (relatively) questionable aspect of c++. On the article itself, I don't believe anyone sincerely consider C++ to be a good introductory language. It is dragged by a lot of low-level concerns which are only a dead-weight for a beginner. At this point of a programming cursus, the focus should be on understanding algorithms and low level details that can be useful in other contexts only serves to trip students. As for the higher level of C++, such as everything object oriented, I believe it becomes and additional load on the understanding of the language(why are Strings initialized this way? How come I can call a function from a data type with the dot-notation, but functions I define can only be called by themselves?) I find it to be also weird that String::length returns a type_t. The way I understood this type was that it represented a memory size. When we call length, we want the number of characters, independantly of the character size under the hood.

mikeash 13y ago
A lot of people think C++ was a good introductory language, or at least thought it was. C++ was the language of choice for introductory programming courses at both my high school and university. "Good" in this case was generally evaluated on the basis of "that's what people use out in the real world, so that's what we should teach" rather than actual suitability for instruction. The concept that it might be better to start out teaching one language, then switch languages later on once the basics are mastered is foreign to a lot of people. People who have never learned more than one or two programming languages tend to think that if your goal is to master C++, you should start with C++, and any time spent on any other language is wasted.

mikeash 13y ago

A lot of people think C++ was a good introductory language, or at least thought it was. C++ was the language of choice for introductory programming courses at both my high school and university. "Good" in this case was generally evaluated on the basis of "that's what people use out in the real world, so that's what we should teach" rather than actual suitability for instruction. The concept that it might be better to start out teaching one language, then switch languages later on once the basics are mastered is foreign to a lot of people. People who have never learned more than one or two programming languages tend to think that if your goal is to master C++, you should start with C++, and any time spent on any other language is wasted.