People coding in a different subset of C++ is predictable from an interview? Howso? Not that they know it, but that they prefer it and do it to the contrary of people asking them not to.
Most other languages it doesn't matter anywhere near as much, as idiosyncrasies can be cordoned off well, but with C++, anyone doing anything strange or incompatible anywhere is a problem for most everyone. That same power and control is a curse when people are controlling things two different ways.
In a bigco which takes 6 months to fire someone, this is killer to a project. One guy can destroy a project in that timespan.
C++ has it's place, and that place is "where we can afford pretty high salaries and fire those people who don't work out quickly".
I think that's a bit dramatic. If a coder can't assimilate into your code base and follow the patterns already in use, they would fail regardless of the language.
It's more of a forefront issue with C++. Also, there are tons of ways to write C++, there are very few (relatively speaking) for Java, C, Python, Ruby or Objective-C.
If someone tends to use a different style of dot notation in Obj-C, no biggy, at worse you get a leak or two that an automated tool can find 75% of the time
If someone uses a different type of pointer/reference on a serious chunk of the codebase or a different style of template based inheritance, you're up shit creek really fast.
The language itself has tons of choices all over. The issue is getting everyone on the same page without crushing creative, high spirited people or having to fire otherwise excellent engineers.
I'm not saying the language is useless, I'm saying it is a huge ass staffing pain to get the right mix of engineers who are brilliant and willing to slavishly do what they're told which is hard to find.
Most other languages it doesn't matter anywhere near as much, as idiosyncrasies can be cordoned off well, but with C++, anyone doing anything strange or incompatible anywhere is a problem for most everyone. That same power and control is a curse when people are controlling things two different ways.
In a bigco which takes 6 months to fire someone, this is killer to a project. One guy can destroy a project in that timespan.
C++ has it's place, and that place is "where we can afford pretty high salaries and fire those people who don't work out quickly".