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"the complexity of C++ is troubling" This comes out of the fact that C++ is being developed more as an engineering tool than as a programming toy. When you're

"the complexity of C++ is troubling" This comes out of the fact that C++ is being developed more as an engineering tool than as a programming toy. When you're into real engineering, you don't have free lunch.

seabee 12y ago
You can see this with Rust which tries to satisfy the same niche. It's possible to avoid the gotchas in C++ while preserving the advantages, you just pay a different price by working harder to satisfy the compiler.
- kbart 12y ago
  A lot of people working with C/C++ I know are looking forward to Rust, but the problem is that currently it's nowhere near as mature and widespread as former languages. I hope that will change in the near future as it looks like promising system language.
  - RBO2 12y ago
    Why wait for Rust when D is already there?
    - kbart 12y ago
      Honestly, I haven't tried D, but if it hadn't got traction in 14 years, I'd say it was a miss. It's not enough to be a good language -- documentation, tools, libraries, community, adoption in open source projects is, arguably, even more important.
unfamiliar 12y ago
I disagree. I see most of the complexity of C++ as being due to design mistakes which have to be maintained for backwards compatibility. I would personally like to see a breaking change where a lot of the inconsistencies and design mistakes that have been identified are rectified.
innguest 12y ago
This is the attitude that keeps us mired in subpar ideas like C, C++, Java, HTML, CSS, JS. "I'm a tough guy and tough guys use tools that make our lives hell! We're serious! We're engineers! Your language is just a toy because our managers want to keep us fungible!" What does an average "real engineer" C++ programmer have at their disposal? C++ has an ersatz type system (not algebraic and not connected to type theory) and an ersatz macro system (templates and preprocessing) and it offloads type signing onto the programmer (no help from an inferencer). It also lacks a garbage-collector because its followers are still afraid of non-existing "performance penalties". C++ has an ambiguous grammar that is context-dependent and requires infinite lookahead. Its creator is not any revolutionary thinker like Alan Kay, just some guy that wrote a language and become famous for writing that language. He also said that we hear a lot of complaints about C++ just because a lot of people use it, not because it's crap. But bullies like restalis rejoice in the fact that know-nothing managers keep choosing C++ because it's the industry bandwagon and you can count on universities to supply the market with a fresh load of programmers trained in mediocre tools time and again. You're a bandwagoner.
- restalis 12y ago
  "What does an average «real engineer» C++ programmer have at their disposal?" Ways to do the job. C++ is not perfect, I contest some of its design decisions (like having private class members by default, and having to explicitly (i.e. verbose) declare "public" at least some of them to make that given class usable), but I don't have to fight the language so much to get things done. For me the best job C++ does so far is by staying a tool. I don't want _BY_DEFAULT_ "something more", "something clever", or "something whatever" that adds more accidental complexity [1] which comes around when least expected and gets in my way! This being said, I admit that C++ suffers from feature creep like many other things do, but (as a consolation) it got here like this only after serious critique for each of the added feature and each feature had to pass serious filtering in order to "creep in". "managers keep choosing C++" Actually, I am the one choosing C++ for what I do, be it corporate related (and managed by managers) work or personal projects. I choose it for both low level and almost scripting-like tasks, although I used (and consider myself proficient in) other toy programming languages too. [1] http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf

seabee 12y ago

You can see this with Rust which tries to satisfy the same niche. It's possible to avoid the gotchas in C++ while preserving the advantages, you just pay a different price by working harder to satisfy the compiler.

kbart 12y ago
A lot of people working with C/C++ I know are looking forward to Rust, but the problem is that currently it's nowhere near as mature and widespread as former languages. I hope that will change in the near future as it looks like promising system language.
- RBO2 12y ago
  Why wait for Rust when D is already there?
  - kbart 12y ago
    Honestly, I haven't tried D, but if it hadn't got traction in 14 years, I'd say it was a miss. It's not enough to be a good language -- documentation, tools, libraries, community, adoption in open source projects is, arguably, even more important.

unfamiliar 12y ago

I disagree. I see most of the complexity of C++ as being due to design mistakes which have to be maintained for backwards compatibility. I would personally like to see a breaking change where a lot of the inconsistencies and design mistakes that have been identified are rectified.

innguest 12y ago

This is the attitude that keeps us mired in subpar ideas like C, C++, Java, HTML, CSS, JS. "I'm a tough guy and tough guys use tools that make our lives hell! We're serious! We're engineers! Your language is just a toy because our managers want to keep us fungible!" What does an average "real engineer" C++ programmer have at their disposal? C++ has an ersatz type system (not algebraic and not connected to type theory) and an ersatz macro system (templates and preprocessing) and it offloads type signing onto the programmer (no help from an inferencer). It also lacks a garbage-collector because its followers are still afraid of non-existing "performance penalties". C++ has an ambiguous grammar that is context-dependent and requires infinite lookahead. Its creator is not any revolutionary thinker like Alan Kay, just some guy that wrote a language and become famous for writing that language. He also said that we hear a lot of complaints about C++ just because a lot of people use it, not because it's crap. But bullies like restalis rejoice in the fact that know-nothing managers keep choosing C++ because it's the industry bandwagon and you can count on universities to supply the market with a fresh load of programmers trained in mediocre tools time and again. You're a bandwagoner.

restalis 12y ago
"What does an average «real engineer» C++ programmer have at their disposal?" Ways to do the job. C++ is not perfect, I contest some of its design decisions (like having private class members by default, and having to explicitly (i.e. verbose) declare "public" at least some of them to make that given class usable), but I don't have to fight the language so much to get things done. For me the best job C++ does so far is by staying a tool. I don't want _BY_DEFAULT_ "something more", "something clever", or "something whatever" that adds more accidental complexity [1] which comes around when least expected and gets in my way! This being said, I admit that C++ suffers from feature creep like many other things do, but (as a consolation) it got here like this only after serious critique for each of the added feature and each feature had to pass serious filtering in order to "creep in". "managers keep choosing C++" Actually, I am the one choosing C++ for what I do, be it corporate related (and managed by managers) work or personal projects. I choose it for both low level and almost scripting-like tasks, although I used (and consider myself proficient in) other toy programming languages too. [1] http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf