[e4m]

I'm not sure why C++ is the butt of so many jokes. Making fun of it just seems to be the in thing to do. I bet most of the jokers have never seriously used it.

Personally, I get a lot of use out of C++ and actually enjoy using it. Sure, it can get complex at times when doing really hard stuff, but it'll force you to stop and understand the implications of what it is you are doing thus forcing you to do it correctly.

C++ won't let you get away with half the crap that many other languages will. Knowing C++ will make you a better programmer in all languages. Try it and see.

[old-gregg]

In this context, first time ever since I joined HN, I'll be brave to openly say this out loud: C++ is my favorite language. Ughh... I did it! :)

A little background: I started coding in x86 ASM (because some idiot told me that was the only language computers understood when I was 14), switched to Pascal, then C, then C++, then I got my 1st job as VB6 oracle-to-form data pusher, then I did 5 years of very exciting C++ library development, i.e. other programmers were my customers. [highly recommend this - much easier to market&sell than any other market, learn from DHH, Trolltech or MySQL AB]

In 2002 I moved to higher level languages: Python, some Perl and lots of Ruby and Javascript. And honestly I'm not that more productive coding Ruby than I was ever in C++. Yeah, it's nice to read an entire file, break it down into an array of lines, grep them with some regexp and apply a function on each result - all that in a single line of code, but... well, read on:

C++ allows for some beautiful type-safe and performant high-level design constructs that Java, Python or even Ruby can't touch: just combine multiple inheritance with medium-complexity templates and see what you can do. Only Haskell gives me the same type-safe, nearly as fast and flexible (yet very high level) material to build software of. Being a realist, I don't see Haskell ever "making it" into the industry, but the updated C++ definitely will.

Duck typed languages are nice, but require enormous layers of unit tests to protect yourself from stupid things like misspelled variable names or even renamed/missing code files. Building with Rails without unit testing is a suicide. Doing Haskell without unit testing is actually isn't that bad. And this requirement to test the shit out of your code [2-to-1 ratios aren't uncommon] kills the spirit of exploratory programming for me. Moreover, 200x speed penalty means that simple O(n) algorithms won't cut it for an average data set, forcing you to build more complex solutions just because your language can't scan a big-ass array under 10ms. Moreover, most high-level languages live inside of a VM, which makes them useless for general purpose software development: they represent "fuck you" approach, i.e. they'll easily call your C library, but won't let you easily call them. JAR is as good to me as my swap file: I can't afford to carry around JVM on my back just because I want to call your Java code from Haskell or C++.

[ubernostrum]

"And this requirement to test the shit out of your code [2-to-1 ratios aren't uncommon] kills the spirit of exploratory programming for me."

Which is why most of us don't write unit tests when we're in the exploratory phase of something.

"Moreover, 200x speed penalty means that simple O(n) algorithms won't cut it for an average data set, forcing you to build more complex solutions just because your language can't scan a big-ass array under 10ms."

I think that you and I have different ideas of what an "average" data set is, then, or the performance constraints expected of it. Although given the number of mathematicians and professional scientists who crunch their data in Python these days (see: NumPy, SciPy), I'd also suspect that maybe you should investigate this a bit more deeply.

[ajross]

Conversely, it's be my experience that the most of C++'s most ardent adherents haven't "seriously used" other environments. Specifically, they tend to have a very poor grasp of both dynamically typed languages and functional programming. While they might "know" tools like Python, they don't think in these languages well and tend to write very clumsy code.

For myself, once I got to a point where I could "think well" using syntax at both a high level of abstraction and write solid C code at the system call level I found that the space of "appropriate" problems for C++ had shrunk to almost nothing. By itself, if it's the only language you're ever going to learn, C++ is not a bad choice. But in the modern world of polyglot development on CPUs too fast to measure, it's almost never the best one.

[ramchip]

I found that the space of "appropriate" problems for C++ had shrunk to almost nothing. As a fairly low-level programmer (data acquisition, signal/image processing), this isn't quite my experience. I've found that a mix of simple C-style code for the layers that directly interact with the material, with higher-level layers such as the GUI implemented in the usual C++, makes for a very decent mix, and certainly a better one than plain C.

I could also keep the systems stuff in C functions and use an FFI to call them, but I've never found a language that enabled me to write GUIs more easily than with plain old C++ and Qt. Java (or Java from Clojure) is slow and ugly as sin, and most other languages either use bindings to C/C++ libraries or have incomplete, mostly unsupported kits. C# and family is perhaps an exception, but not very portable.

[michaelfeathers]

It's a mixed bag. Yes, C++ forces you to slow down and be deliberate, but you're slowed down when you're on the wrong path and trying to get back to the right one also. I can't tell you the number of large C++ code bases I've seen which are nearly unsalvageable because the language makes it too hard to move back to goodness when you've strayed.

[e4m]

Yes. Some folks do not have the aptitude to be serious programmers. That's not the tool's fault.

[windsurfer]

I like C++, and I don't like my languages forcing anything on me, unless I tell it to. That's why C++ and perl are among my favourites.

[adamc]

I don't see how one can read this and not laugh. It is a marvel of obscurity.

No one doubts that C++ has been used to do hard things. They doubt that it was really better than using C++ with some higher-level language.

[adamc]

Doh. Meant to say "C with some higher-level language".