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by throwaway894345 1365 days ago
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.
1 comments

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.

> 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.