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Comment by thebear | Hacker News Reader

Author of the blog post here. I think you just made me aware of the true and deeper reason for my discomfort with C++: it's the fact that the convolutions are in the basic things. I am perfectly willing to put up with convolutions, annoyances, bugs, weaknesses etc. in anything I use, be it a programming language, a piece of software, a gadget, whatever. Nothing is perfect, and who am I to criticize others for the imperfections in their work. What annoys me is when the annoyances are in the basic things, in the most commonly used features. Make the basic things reasonably good, and keep the crap off to the side.

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I think that one reason the convolutions are in the basic things was the principle that C++ should be a superset of C, which is nominally a value-semantics language, but which, with the use of pointers, very commonly (and intentionally) leads to code with aspects of reference semantics. One example of this is that C++ adopted The C practice in which arrays decay to pointers.

In addition, C++ not only inherited C's static-typing rules, but strengthened them, and complicated them with inheritance (multiple, and polymorphic or not, according to your needs), function overloads and operator overloading. Now add generic types through templates, and the cases to be handled explodes to the point where you need a Turing-complete parser.

A good case can be made for each of C++'s features individually, which leads to justifications of the form "As we want both X and Y (and without sacrificing run-time efficiency), then there really isn't any alternative to [insert counter-intuitive issue here]..."

That it works at all is a testament to the skill of the people involved. The complications that remain seem qualitatively different than the sort of gratuitous inconsistencies that you find in PHP, for example.

I'd be very careful with the claim that you are willing to put up with bugs.

Bugs in language or compiler will make the language useless for any project which is expected to work.

I'm gonna be bold any say that you nor anyone else would put up with it. There's enough bug in one's own code, there is rarely any space for unreliable infrastructure.

This reminds me of a goal Larry Wall for Perl when he was designing it: "make the easy things easy, and the hard things possible".

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