I am still asking myself why on earth people should need Mono, .NET, C# or similar stuff. I am starting to think that while more and more people are starting to

I am still asking myself why on earth people should need Mono, .NET, C# or similar stuff. I am starting to think that while more and more people are starting to code, the overall coding skills are getting lower and lower. Maybe it’s just me being too strict in using almost always C/C++, but I remain extremely confident in the fact that if you don’t know how/don’t want to manage memory, you should be doing something else. I think opinions like this are a significant impediment to the advancement of the programming profession in general. The entire point of using a computer is to automate difficult, repetitive problems. Resource management is a problem ideally suited for automation. There are literally dozens of working, proven, high-quality garbage collection and reference counting implementations, and deciding to re-use one is not a sign of weakness nor ignorance. If anything, I think true ignorance is beginning new projects in a legacy language such as C or C++. If more programmers wrote in high-level languages such as LISP, OCaml, Haskell, or even mid-level languages like C# or Java, program crashes and corruptions would be much rarer events. I don’t want to spend more time talking about this: you can verify what I’m telling you is true by looking at the percentage of KDE code written in languages different from C++. And we have some great bindings. Here's where the author lost me. The reason KDE applications favor C++ isn't due to any inherent benefits of using C++, it's because they are trapped and cannot escape! Qt has terrible bindings, in large part because C++ is so difficult to interact with. The only mature, widely used binding I'm aware of is to Python -- contrast this to Gtk+, which has bindings to nearly any popular language you can think of; C#, Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, D, LISP, Haskell, OCaml, (ry. And if you ask anybody that uses PyQt regularly, they'll tell you how "alien" it feels -- signals and slots are implemented by embedding C++ declarations into Python string literals! So this is the point, on which you are free to flame me until death: the problem is GTK. Consider the amount of programs recently written in GTK. A huge percentage of them is in Python or Mono. [...] We have PyQt and Qyoto. Yet they are not so widespread and planetkde is filled with new C++/Qt apps. So where is the problem? Probably people are no longer comfortable in programming with GTK/C. I did it a while ago, and it was quite a pain to me actually, and it made me want to look into python, damn my laziness. And here is the crux of it. In this paragraph, the author states that using C is difficult, and then blames himself! Is this Stockholm syndrome at work? I think the average HN reader would have been overjoyed at being able to use a high-level language instead of groveling through a morass of C/C++, but the author's sentence reads as if he wants to punish himself for infidelity! Gentlemen, languages and libraries are not wives; they do not deserve loyalty. Do not be like this author, turning your back on advances in the craft due to a misplaced macho attitude or stubbornness.