[Someone]

It's worse. In C++, that first error often is a red herring. The classical example is a header file where one forgets to type a semicolon. In classical C++ compilers, that triggered errors pointing to the file that includes the erroneous header.

For examples, see #9 in http://web.mst.edu/~cpp/common/common_errors.html, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11216569/missing-semicolo..., or http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14077486/c-learning-heade... (nice example of someone manages to solve a "missing semicolon before X in file F, line L" error, and is smart enough to realize that that probably is not the right way to fix the problem)

Clang developers have worked hard to improve that; see http://clang.llvm.org/diagnostics.html, section "Quality of Implementation and Attention to Detail".

[scott_s]

While I have trained myself to look for "clusters of errors" instead of individual errors, in my experience, the first error g++ reports tends to be the real cause. (I've also been programming in C++ long enough that I often don't even bother reading the error message - it's usually quicker if I just go to that line of code, and look for what's wrong.)