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Comment by htns | Hacker News Reader

Re (5), I rather feel that the quality of the documentation and communication around modern C++ puts everything else to shame. If you knew java or python in 2009, how are you supposed to quickly catch up with 2019? (Rust also seems to have piled on a lot of additions since 1.0, but I don't use it so I shouldn't speak.) There are books and blogs for everything popular, but it's really a little shocking to me that no other big language has anything that can compare to cppreference.com.

This doesn't change what people other than me might be thinking, of course.

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I guess it's a question of habit. I'm learning C++ during my free time since a few months. I find cppreference.com really difficult to parse. I understand way more of the documentation now than when I started because of the bit of experience I gained, but it is written in a way that makes everything sounds really over-complicated. I remember when I googled for something and arrived at the page about "Value category": https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/value_category. If you're not already well familiar with the language, this page is really hard to understand IMHO.

I found it way easier to deal with Go, C#, and Ruby documentation for example.

Cppreference is great, but it is not the best place to learn the language.

I don't recommend cppreference for novices. It is by no means an easy read. It is a reference, first of all. It enumerates all possible minutiae exhaustively. Unless you are already familiar, to a degree, with most of the topics, reading it is going to be frustrating. The second obstacle is the terminology. C++ defines a lot of terms that are not in common use in other languages. It takes time to be acclimated.

The reason that it is popular in the C++ community is that it cuts down legalese a lot when compared to the language standard.

Try books first. Meyers and Josuttis write excellent books. The template guide by Vandevoorde and Josuttis is my gateway drug to becoming a language lawyer. It is still hard, but at least manageable.

> The following expressions are lvalue expressions: [...] a string literal, such as "Hello, world!"

That's pretty interesting. I'm not even sure how to test the effect of

  "Hello, world!" = <something>

I imagine the reason this is allowed has something to do with how strings decay into pointers.

> I found it way easier to deal with ... Ruby documentation for example.

Maybe in documentation detailing the methods available, but as far as I know, there's no official spec for the syntax nor the details of the semantics of the language.

I agree that cppreference is amazing and is my only c++ link in my browser favourites. Documentation is typically clear and succinct. And its a wiki!

Not a fan of the spongers that scrape it though.

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