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Comment by droithomme | Hacker News Reader

"I'd be more interested on what someone who actually has a lot of experience in using C++ says."

I have considerable experience with C++, going back to when it was called C with Classes and you used a preprocessor to convert C with Classes code to C and then compiled the C.

What Linus says is pretty much true. I don't expect it to matter though since when people say "I'd be more interested on what someone who actually has a lot of experience in using C++ says." they don't really mean it.

There is another guy I know of with considerable experience in C++, Yossi Kreinin, who knows more about C++ than Stroustrop. He has a very nice web site that is one of the best references in C++ I have seen, going far deeper than others. Yossi is the number one expert on C++ in the world today. I recommend his insights to all: http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/

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I've used C++ more than any other language, both professionally and for personal projects, for 13 years. I freely admit that C++ is complex, and it takes considerable effort to understand how to write good C++ code. Even after 13 years, I know that I do not know every rule. Nevertheless, I have been very productive with it.

I got about 3 pages into the meat of the FQA. I can't bring myself to spend the time to go further, because his counterpoints already seem overwhelmingly specious to me. This leads me to wonder on what grounds you characterize him as "the number one expert on C++" "who knows more about C++ than Stroustrup".

The best reference on C++ that I have seen remains the C++ FAQ. (http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/) I have also always enjoyed Stroustrup's guidance on his language, and I'm inclined to continue believing he knows at least as much about his own language as anybody, until I see some more convincing evidence to the contrary.

You can pretty much Know C inside of ten years of using it professionally. I swear after twenty years of using C++ I still come across things I've never seen before, the rabbit hole very deep indeed.

Now with the new C++ there's a ton of new stuff to absorb.

30 years in, and I still discover new things about C, every six months or so. Granted, they're usually pretty subtle.

There's never a hope of knowing 100%, but it is reasonable to be familiar enough to know 80% with ten years of experience and 95% with twenty. By thirty if you're the kind to take knowing your toolset seriously, 99% is possible. That last 1% is the "you can't be serious" aspect of the C standard.

I don't like C++ but the FQA isn't a very good critique of it. It's basically "Why didn't Bjarne write the language the way Yossi would have?"

Isn't every critique of programming languages necessarily very personal? After all, programming languages are languages. They help people develop and express ideas, and we don't know a whole lot about how creativity actually works and how it is influenced by the tools we use in the process.

Take inconsistencies for instance. An inconsistency between two things means that one but not the other can be inferred by applying a particular principle. But who chooses the principle that is applied to decide whether or not there is an inconsistency?

There is no shortage of "principles" in people's heads, many of which are not at all formal, maybe not even explicitly stated and they might not be called principles at all. They may be complex webs of associations, habits, or patterns that apply in some but not in other application areas.

Another such thing is the balance between generality and special casing. You could probably find out empirically what level of either is outside of what most people can use productively. But no individual is most people. So everyone has to decide what makes them personally productive.

The only regrettable thing is that so few people even try to find out.

"C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it."

So what's his excuse? RE: Linux

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