[hackingthenews]

But that is not inherently a bad thing.

If we look at programming languages as tools, it makes sense for them to get out of date and new ones taking their place, with all the lessons learned.

So its possible that programming languages like C++ that keeps extending their own life through adding features (while keeping weaknesses), will ultimately cost the community/industry more in the long run.

[rubber_duck]

I'm not saying Java should have introduced ground breaking features - I'm saying they made design mistakes that they should have corrected far sooner (var/type inference) and refused to add some basic features (lambdas) that would have made the code a lot better for it.

They did add those features eventually (Java 8) - about 8 years behind C# (since C# 3.0)

[Aerroon]

>If we look at programming languages as tools, it makes sense for them to get out of date and new ones taking their place, with all the lessons learned.

Part of me thinks that this is how it should be. Extending a language constantly while providing backwards compatibility can lead to some awkward syntax too.

[hackingthenews]

Agreed.

Just gonna drop this here: Nicolai Josuttis “The Nightmare of Initialization in C++” [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/7DTlWPgX6zs

[pietroglyph]

The thing is that this is not a huge issue in practice. I stick to uniform initialization in 99% of cases and it works out pretty well. I have far fewer bugs from initialization screwups than from other things.

[Aerroon]

But what kind of an effect does this have on someone new learning the language? It seems to me like it would make it slightly harder to learn and get used to.

[lenkite]

Simple, read and religiously follow the Core Guidelines. Bad, converting initialisations are also flagged as warnings (or errors with -Werror).