[COFF] What languges would you like to learn?

[davida at pobox.com (David Arnold)]

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C++ is several different languages in one compiler. 

You can use it as a stricter C, as a C with some syntactic support of ADTs, as C++98-style OO, or as a C++17 style meta-programming system.  And I’ve probably missed a few. 

The resulting complexity requires a lot of discipline to use successfully, especially in a large team.

Java competes pretty successfully with the C++98-style OO subset.  C11 now competes with the stricter C subset.

The C++17 feature set competes with ... LISP, maybe?  It’s a pretty clear winner for some  application areas. 



d

> On 27 Dec 2019, at 03:58, Bakul Shah <bakul at bitblocks.com> wrote:
> 
> You can write “cleaner C++” but you will also need to read, understand & possibly
> modify other people’s code. But don’t let the naysayers stop you. You must find
> out for yourself! You must speak the native language of the community you want
> to be part of. If you deride their local language and proselytize Esperanto, the
> natives may not take kindly to you!
> 
>> On Dec 25, 2019, at 9:43 PM, Wesley Parish <wobblygong at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> I will admit the modern version reads a lot more cleanly than the
>> older versions. They finally got rid of the pretense that a C++ header
>> file was the same sort of thing as a C header file.
>> 
>> I tried to learn it back in the nineties with one of the Sams Teach
>> Yourself books and Borland's Turbo C++ compiler (before I switched to
>> Linux), but at the end I was still as mystified as before. It took
>> immersion into Java before I finally got the hang of object
>> orientation, and Java's still a lot smaller than C++.
>> 
>> A friend wants me to write some utilities for a C++ project he's got,
>> so I figure I may as well help him out. Otherwise I'd be just as happy
>> without C++. I'll try to keep the complexity down to the limit
>> suggested by the Unix philosophy - a piece of code that does only one
>> thing and does it well. :)
>> 
>> Wesley Parish
>> 
>>> On 12/26/19, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>>> 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++.
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