[mattgreenrocks]

My theory is that the Internet generally hates multi-paradigm languages (Scala!). Key phrase there is “the Internet,” which is a euphemism for “people who write in the comment section.” They aren’t a representative sample, just a vocal one.

There are plenty of good reasons to hate on C++, but that’s conflated with a lot of “real hacker” signaling.

Most takes on C++ lament that it isn’t C, or is too complex. Rust is a quality replacement for C++, but it doesn’t succeed on either of those counts either.

All new code I write is in Rust or Haskell. If I need to do something weird, like with DynamoRIO, C++ it is.

[riffraff]

Python and Ruby were considered multiparadigm languages once, and the internet didn't hate them at all.

I think "the internet" tends to complain about languages which have accrued complexity over time, and contain parts that are now considered bad but still lurk in the shadows tripping you up.

Scala, C++, perl and others seem to fall into this category.

[throwaway894345]

I think the Internet doesn’t like languages that don’t have good, strong opinions that will help you find a successful path. C++ just says “here’s every feature we’ve ever heard of; good luck!” whereas Go has strong opinions about how you should build software and while they might change people, they really do put you on the right track. Rust is closer to Rust, but it has so many features that it still takes some time to figure out the happy path—fortunately, the Rust community makes up for a lot of that with excellent documentation (e.g., the Rust Book) and helpful, friendly forums.

[mattgreenrocks]

Yes, this is what I'm getting at.

There's a very real desire for things to just be laid out for you, and much less regard for whether the workflow/tradeoffs associated with that beget quality software in the process.

It is hard to not see this as an army of advanced beginners unconsciously trying to avoid doing the work required to level up.

[throwaway894345]

> It is hard to not see this as an army of advanced beginners unconsciously trying to avoid doing the work required to level up.

I don't think it's hard at all. "I don't want to have to manually manage dependencies" isn't "avoiding leveling up", it's just not doing pointless work that computers are good at doing. Similarly, there's negative value in requiring every/most project to script its own bespoke build system (CMake) when 99% of projects can fit a mold (and then there are efficiencies when 99% of those projects fit that mold--e.g., trivial cross compilation). None of this stuff is meaningfully related to "leveling up". Similarly, bombarding people with language primitives that are almost always footguns (e.g., inheritance) isn't really helping anyone "level up" except to know not to use those features.

In the C++ world, you have an army of people who think they're experts because they've navigated all of these problems to find something that sort of works, but in practice they're far less productive and often don't know what they're missing out on from the rest of the industry. I would rather have people who are productive but don't pretend they're experts.

[nine_k]

My problem with C++ is that, with all its complexity, it's still unsafe. Efforts to add safety to it as a,library (unique_ptr, etc) are commendable and useful, but they cannot be comprehensive, because the language's design, especially the early decisions, resists them.

Lack of modularity and the fact that everything is treated like a single source file (via #include) adds interesting ways of unexpected interactions.