[COFF] What languges would you like to learn?

[lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)]

On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 02:44:06PM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Dec 2019, Wesley Parish wrote:
> 
> >I'm thinking of finally learning C++.  [...]
> 
> C++?  That way lies madness :-)  I had to teach myself it once (with the aid
> of The Book) and was glad to leave it behind.  Oh, it was also the
> first OO lang that I'd ever used, which probably didn't help.
> 
> I can still read it, bot no way will I go back to writing in it...

Amen, brother.  Bell Labs did some great things, a lot of great things,
but C++ is not one of them.

I read the book and wanted to like it, I liked how constructors/destructors
stacked, that seemed elegant to me.  I wanted that for all the methods and
soon found out only allocation/deallocation stacked.  That seemed lame.

C++ seems to encourage complexity and I hate complexity.  I tolerate
it when there is no other way, but as my math kids say, if you have the
right answer, it is beautiful and simple.  Complex is reserved for when
you haven't figured it out yet.  That's not totally fair, I've written
some complex code but I did have the nagging feeling there must be a
simpler way.

C++ teams are riddled with rules "don't use this, don't use that".  It's
an interesting language to look at but I'll choose C over C++ every time.
You can fake OO in C, Sun did it with vnodes and it worked just fine.  I'd
rather fake it and have it be simple than have C++ and have it be weird.

That might be me just being an old fart but I have yet to have someone
I admire tell me I need to use C++.