musicmatzes blog

This is the third part of my series about C++.

After some serious discussions with several people, I came to a conclusion. Well, not really a conclusion, as it was clear from the beginning of the series or even before, when I started to learn C++ at my university, but a point where I can say that C++ is not as shitty as I thought before.

Well, even the word “bullshit” isn't the right terminus.

C++ does some things which seem to be really really weird when you first start learning it. After all, I wouldn't suggest it as first programming language to a newbie!

I still consider the syntax of C++ as bloated and not really helpful in certain ways, as (for my taste) one can hide too much of the relevant stuff. One cannot directly see what's happening in a piece of code without knowing the stuff around the code, the infrastructure or at least the types of the variables. Other languages solve this “problem” much better.

I had a discussion with a friend of mine who is really into C++ and he explained the benefits, which I fully understand. I also had a discussion with a friend who is at most a C++-Critic. Both of them made valid points.

After all, it is a matter of taste whether you like C++ or you don't. I do not like it. I can see its benefits over C, but I consider other languages as better. C++ has a historical background, of course. I don't want to ciritcize this, but I think there are other languages which adress the problems C++ addresses much better today.

I'm speaking of D, Rust, Go and the like, of course. I also consider languages like Haskell, Erlang, the whole Lisp Family and the JVM stuff as better solutions to most problems. Not only that I consider them as easier to learn, but also much easier to maintain and less cluttered with language elements one has to understand to work on an existing codebase. tags: #programming #c++