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Comment by tempest_ | Hacker News Reader

It really depends on what bit of computer science you are learning.

C++ is definitely past its prime and has been surpassed in many areas by other languages but there are still a bunch of domains where it is the primary language.

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How about almost all domains? Everything in the world runs on top of browsers/operating systems/drivers/VMs/networks/embedded systems etc. that are written in C/C++. Not to mention that the tools used to design chips and manufacture them are also written in C/C++. No other language comes even close.

Having C or C++ somewhere in the lower levels of your stack doesn't make them the primary language for your domain. Other wise CPU microcode would be the primary language of every domain.

In fact there is plenty that can be expressed only in C++. A person making effective use of the power of the language finds anything else a huge step down.

Anyone not having fun when coding C++ is doing it wrong.

Example of some well-written code that expresses things that can only be expressed in C++?

I'm far from the most experienced in C++, but friend classes/functions do not seem to have a direct equivalent in any other language.

In C#, nested classes are effectively friends with their outer class, and it's used quite often in practice.

On the other end of expressivity, in Eiffel, every class member is declared as visible to specific other classes; if you want something to be public, you say that it's visible to ANY, which is the universal base class similar to e.g. Object in Java.

NB: Friend-this and -that are not among powerful features of C++.

Because you don’t need them in other languages.

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