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Comment by jergosh | Hacker News Reader

This post boils down to "Take C, add support for OO, a crapload of new syntax, standard library that 10x as large and ta-da! you can find problems which have simpler solutions than in C."

There's a great post by Linus Torvalds about C vs. C++ in the kernel. Some excerpts:

"My point being, that C++ adds absolutely nothing interesting."

"C++ is a mess. There's no design. It's just "add crud on top of C". And the crud isn't even meaningful, much less does it have a design. It's totally and utterly random.

It started out random, now it's randomness that gets added to by a committee."

Whole thing: http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&...

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The author of the OP has a pretty well written rebuttal to everything Torvalds has said about C++:

http://warp.povusers.org/OpenLetters/ResponseToTorvalds.html

I looked at the rebuttal and I couldn't make past the part where he argues against this point - It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it ... Even if the choice of C were to do nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C*

As someone who had substantial exposure to interviewing and hiring C and C++ programmers to add to a team of 250 it was bloody obvious that a lot of pure C++ programmers are the pompous know-it-alls who think they know C++, while C people are those with far more realistic self-assessment who actually do know the language. Linus got it absolutely right.

That article is not very informative, and spends a lot of time characterizing Linus as someone with the “C-hacker syndrome.”

I find the article to be vastly more informative than most of Linus' posts about C++, which usually read more like rants than well informed criticism. He does not characterize Linus as a "C-hacker", Linus does that himself by posting an opinion about C++ that completely lacks substance.

The OS-level stuff I work on is in C. C++ would be a disaster. When you are working in environments that /define/ the run-time of your system: Interrupts, exceptions, memory management, threads and so on, the extra crud is actively harmful.

That said, when I'm working at the application level, C++ is better at a lot of things.

Finally, my cow-orkers and I have an agreement that if any of us start doing template metaprogramming, that that person will be shot.

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