[COFF] What languges would you like to learn?

[Bakul Shah]

You can write “cleaner C++” but you will also need to read, understand & possibly
modify other people’s code. But don’t let the naysayers stop you. You must find
out for yourself! You must speak the native language of the community you want
to be part of. If you deride their local language and proselytize Esperanto, the
natives may not take kindly to you!

> On Dec 25, 2019, at 9:43 PM, Wesley Parish <wobblygong at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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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