From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: wobblygong at gmail.com (Wesley Parish) Date: Thu, 26 Dec 2019 18:43:17 +1300 Subject: [COFF] What languges would you like to learn? In-Reply-To: <20191226040024.GH3839@mcvoy.com> References: <20191225173101.GA13390@tau1.ceti.pl> <44b3a941-fb3e-4fa1-b44d-fdbc34c0776d@gmail.com> <20191226040024.GH3839@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: 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 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++. > _______________________________________________ > COFF mailing list > COFF at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff >