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by LeoNatan25 2291 days ago
From experience, large/old software companies have their own rules what C++ is acceptable. A developer will take some time to learn that, but will then be able to blend in. Again, saying someone cannot write C++ after 10 years experience is nonsense.
2 comments

That's not at all what I wrote though.

You can very well write something without really knowing it. In fact it's more than obvious that the majority of code written these days falls under that category.

Programming is hard and it takes years if not decades to "know" how to do it to an extent that's not harmful. This also applies to learning the tools. Some tools are easier to learn than others. C++ is notoriously difficult to learn.

You can write in a language even if you don't know it fully. C++ is a difficult case, because you have a historically rich syntax with even more richer modern syntax. But that doesn't mean you cannot write in the language, it just means you will focus on a subset that you do know. This is true about any language. Do you know about far pointers in C? Do you know all the intricacies of the Swift or Kotlin syntaxes? That does not mean you can't write software in these languages, or that you don't know them.

JavaScript isn't free of this at all, it's also a very complex syntax, due to many years of lumping more and more features without any coherent design. The tooling around JavaScript is notoriously bad and broken. Having to rely on package for basic stdlib functionality, having to understand how nested dependencies can and will collide, etc.—all of that creates much higher cognitive load than having to use C Lion or Visual Studio (not Code) for C++ development.

Apparently Microsoft, Google and Apple see it otherwise, hence their initiatives to improve C++ static analysers, lock down the use of C and C++ on their platforms with focus on safer languages, and even start making use of hardware memory tagging.