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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

What's wrong with C++? Seems unfair to compare it with JIRA.

I was a C++ programmer in a past life and I sorta like it. C++ and JIRA seem to have the same philosophy with respect to choosing which features to admit: "yes". The idea is that by supporting the largest number of features possible, they'll surely build something that everyone likes because it will tick everyone's boxes. What people frequently fail to realize is that the absence of misfeatures or redundant features is an important feature in and of itself. Moreover, the more features you support, the harder it is to control for quality.

> The idea is that by supporting the largest number of features possible, they'll surely build something that everyone likes because it will tick everyone's boxes.

The idea that the C++ committee are unthinking people pleasers it patently false.

C++ does have a lot of cruft, but mostly because it aims to: i) support new features ii) maintain pretty strong backward compatibility guarantees

In general the new features are actually pretty well liked, but in conjunction with (ii) it creates a big language. There's a reasonably decent subset that can be carved out, but it's also clear why newcomers without legacy baggage (e.g. rust) are making inroads.

"unthinking people pleasers" isn't how I would characterize it; rather, I think of it more as a "kitchen sink" or "more is more" philosophy rather than a "less is more" philosophy. I'm sure the committee deliberated extensively, but deliberation within their particular philosophical context still produced an unpleasant result. I think the same is true of JIRA.

EDIT: clarified wording a bit.

Ex C++ dev and ex JIRA admin. They are the same class of complete bananas.

It's a HackerNews meme from people who never bothered to properly learn C++ and are angry that it's not JavaScript/Ruby/Rust/whatever.

I refer you to my sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31017079

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