3 ms·

Seemingly off-topic, but I'm curious -- what language has the majority of your 20+ years of development been in?

• zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
  Professionally, Java for most of the time. Recreationally, Scala and Haskell. I did about 5 years of C++ overlapping with Java before that.
  • wfunction 12y ago
    Ok, that explains it. When you're used to Java it's easy to expect inheritance to be a big deal. The fact of the matter is that run-time polymorphism (aka virtual) is much more rarely necessary in the C++ world than the Java world. The only reason it's common in Java is that it's the only tool available for many job that C++ has other tools for, and it also avoids an extra composition overhead that doesn't exist in C++. tl;dr: Just because it's "infinitely more valuable" in Java doesn't mean the same for C++.