[COFF] What languges would you like to learn?

[Wesley Parish]

I will admit the modern version reads a lot more cleanly than the
older versions. They finally got rid of the pretense that a C++ header
file was the same sort of thing as a C header file.

I tried to learn it back in the nineties with one of the Sams Teach
Yourself books and Borland's Turbo C++ compiler (before I switched to
Linux), but at the end I was still as mystified as before. It took
immersion into Java before I finally got the hang of object
orientation, and Java's still a lot smaller than C++.

A friend wants me to write some utilities for a C++ project he's got,
so I figure I may as well help him out. Otherwise I'd be just as happy
without C++. I'll try to keep the complexity down to the limit
suggested by the Unix philosophy - a piece of code that does only one
thing and does it well. :)

Wesley Parish

On 12/26/19, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 02:44:06PM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>> On Thu, 26 Dec 2019, Wesley Parish wrote:
>>
>> >I'm thinking of finally learning C++.  [...]
>>
>> C++?  That way lies madness :-)  I had to teach myself it once (with the
>> aid
>> of The Book) and was glad to leave it behind.  Oh, it was also the
>> first OO lang that I'd ever used, which probably didn't help.
>>
>> I can still read it, bot no way will I go back to writing in it...
>
> Amen, brother.  Bell Labs did some great things, a lot of great things,
> but C++ is not one of them.
>
> I read the book and wanted to like it, I liked how constructors/destructors
> stacked, that seemed elegant to me.  I wanted that for all the methods and
> soon found out only allocation/deallocation stacked.  That seemed lame.
>
> C++ seems to encourage complexity and I hate complexity.  I tolerate
> it when there is no other way, but as my math kids say, if you have the
> right answer, it is beautiful and simple.  Complex is reserved for when
> you haven't figured it out yet.  That's not totally fair, I've written
> some complex code but I did have the nagging feeling there must be a
> simpler way.
>
> C++ teams are riddled with rules "don't use this, don't use that".  It's
> an interesting language to look at but I'll choose C over C++ every time.
> You can fake OO in C, Sun did it with vnodes and it worked just fine.  I'd
> rather fake it and have it be simple than have C++ and have it be weird.
>
> That might be me just being an old fart but I have yet to have someone
> I admire tell me I need to use C++.
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