| I know this one. C++ looks good on paper. It has containers and types and generics. You come to find out that it's all based on meta-programming which is an interesting idea: Basically you're writing code to write code, and that code writes code. The whole system is macros all the way down. There's no native language support for anything but macros and the macros implement everything. The student's experience is that he can quickly solve a problem using a list of stacks of strings (vector<stack<string> > > in the parlance.) Which is fine, almost like typed-python until you make a mistake. Then, the compiler, who knows nothing about those types which were all built by expanding macros, is not your friend. Miss a minor `*` and a single line of code will fully expand its underlying macros giving a 10-page, indecipherable error message. Should you make it to runtime, no debugger can tell you the contents of a vector, string or stack. They're just blobs of buffers and pointers with mangled (and yeah, that's the word that they chose: mangled) names to make them extra unreadable. This is when most people ask if they can just have C back. |