[hsmyers]

I don't see this as an 'anti' C or C++ article. I see it as an effort to explain (initially to himself) why the phenomena exists. Not sure I agree with all of it but being a C/C++ programmer on micro-computers from the very beginning, much of what is said resonates. I've pretty much be multi-lingual from my start with IBM360 BAL (the programmers version of 'been down so long everything looks like up :) ) That said when I was able to use C (actually a C subset called BDS C [yes BDS does stand for Brain Dead Software]) I immediately set aside PL1, Fortran, Pascal etc. Because I had found a HLA (High Level Assembler) and was as happy as a pig in mud (how happy is that?). That was in the beginning days of the S100 bus and therefore long ago. Since then I accumulated many languages, somethimes for the hell of it (it looked interested), sometimes because the client wished it and sometimes because it was clearly the right choice. The one pattern I've maintained over all of this time is to learn and test the language by writing a parser in it. Not a random one, but a particular problem I was deeply familiar with. The parsing of chess games. It usually winds up a middling tiny sized work of about a 1000 lines and when done I've a reasonable idea of the workings of the language and more importantly how hard it is to write parsers in. Why parsers? Because to paraphrase the wisdom of turtles, 'It's parsers all of the way down...'

This winds up being a windy version of 'I suppose I'll have to try go to see what's what'