[usrnm]

Are you calling an entire generation of programmers idiots? Do you think they didn't know about C, Smalltalk or Lisp? C++ was the most popular language in the 90s because it was the best tool for a lot of jobs back then, people chose to use it willingly. Arguing that it only got popular because of PR is delusional, it had already gotten popular long before it got any corporation money behind it

[bigfishrunning]

I was part of that generation. C++ was the language that was taught in schools, and many many people were trying to get programming jobs that paid well, but they didn't really care about programming. They treated a programming language like a spoken language, and it never occurred to them how easy it was to learn another one. Many many corporate shops were C++ (or java) shops that wrote gang-of-four design pattern programs with no room for any creativity or experimentation, and a lot of that software is just designed to the moon and unnecessarily complicated. contrast that with the open source software of the time (which was more likely to be written in C then C++) and you'll see a clear quality difference.