Talking with the inventor of C++ [video]

I really enjoy programming in C++, but agree on knot being able to know all of it. It’s just not necessary to know it all. I think this comes with programmer experience too, learning to learn what one needs to know right now along with some very high level of whats available goes a long way. Then when one needs to reach elsewhere, they have an idea of where to go, but none of the details yet. But knowing how to program also means that a large chunk of the problem of using the best language for the job is easier. Doing it idiomatically though, that takes work, but at least knowing the questions is a big start.

IMO C/C++ are great languages if you learn how memory and pointers etc. work. The tooling on the other hand is horrendous when you compare it to other languages like Rust.

> C++ is a big, complex language

And therein lies the actual problem. C++ killed the one saving grace of C, it's relative simplicity, and created a language that is a dumping ground of ideas.

The notion that you just "learn what you need" is an anathema. Not knowing a language, and all it's subtleties, is just a form of hacking. You end up encountering things which you don't understand and have to hope you don't cause unknown problems and muddle through.

That C++ is widely used by professionals who don't understand their tools is just another reason why software is so crappy these days.

My experience of the language has been similar, including the bit about it no longer being part of my life.

For a long time, the complaint was that it was being used as nothing more than a "better C", though in my experience, the worst abuses came from among those who were determined to use every feature.

In the beginning, the fact that early C++ was a superset of C is probably what led to its widespread adoption, but the legacy of that decision, particularly with regard to pointers and pointer arithmetic, has been a multiplier of complexity.

I'd say a lot of this is a form of survivorship bias. I've programmed in C++ since the mid 90s so I am used to a lot of C++'s issues, but I also run a company and have to train new engineers and I see first hand the absolute nightmare that a lot of people encounter learning this language and it's demoralizing. While to me a lot of this is stuff I managed to figure out, I also understand that for many new developers this is just crap that no one should have to deal with in 2023.

Lack of a good way to build third party libraries, build times that are astronomical and a true productivity killer, error messages that are entirely unhelpful and can produce giant walls of text for the most trivial of reasons, rampant undefined behavior that is incredibly hard to identify.

Several things changed my view on C++ and now I see it mostly as a sort of zombie language.

1. As I mentioned once I started my own business and needed to train new engineers on how to use C++, I started to look at the language from a fresh point of view and realized it really is a complex mess just to get basic things working.

2. Scott Meyers "retiring" from C++, and in particular this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAWA1DuvCnQ

3. I attended an ISO C++ meeting in Toronto and while I absolutely found that the people were very intelligent and knowledgeable, as well as well intentioned, I realized just how political C++ is and that much of its development and complexity is not due to technical constraints or driven based on what is in the best interest of the C++ community or research, but really based on name recognition and a lot of politics.

Unfortunately Bjarne himself has been responsible for a lot of political issues with C++ that could have easily been avoided such as the obvious warts with brace initialization and the paper he wrote that basically pushed out two of the most prominent members of the C++ community, Walter Bright and Andrei Alexandrescu over what seems like a bitter pissing contest he had with them:

https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2013/n36...

C++ has had some improvements in the past decade for sure, but its future doesn't look too bright at this point. Features like modules are a convoluted mess that still don't work even 4 years after standardization. Coroutines are a lifetime and performance nightmare that was originally designed in particular to accommodate embedded platforms with no runtime, but are all but useless for that use case due to how they allocate memory, and concepts are really just a substitution of one hacky way of doing overload resolution with another hacky way of doing it.

> Remember, it was the first language taught to older millennials for a reason.

For the reason that it was the only reasonably available language for a while, I'm afraid. I too have written enough C++ in my professional works; nowadays I work with Rust and Python though, my last professional C++ was C++14. And C++ only kinda works when someone with enough mistakes and thus enough knowledges organize the code base in the way that others won't easily make such mistakes. The language doesn't really help you---which is often a pro, but much more frequently a con. That's not a good place for beginners to start at the very least.

To add to this, you can easily learn to use the newest features. I cringe every time I read or hear "C++ has become so huge and complicated". It only takes 20 minutes to get proficient in the newest features such as modules and concepts. People hear "polymorphic lambdas" and imagine something so complicated, it came out of the Necronomicon. No, you simply replace your lambda parameters with auto and the compiler takes care of the types and that's it. And variadic templates aren't going to eat your soul if you can read code that has recursion.

It isn’t as hard as people make out but it also isn’t easy. The saving grace is that the language, particularly in its modern form, is highly amenable to an experienced user designing their own libraries that make the language much nicer to use. You can replace most of the dubious parts. Nonetheless, C++ is unreasonably large.

The main advantage of something like C++20 is that for some types of software there is no other language that comes close in both performance and economy. The alternatives either require much more code or giving up a lot of performance, neither of which is particularly palatable for many use cases. I am always keeping an eye out for smaller languages with similar economy and performance.

I used to love C++, template wrangling :-P aah, but pretty much gave up after C++11. Right about the time when Scott Meyers also said: "enough" (paraphrasing).

My biggest issue for giving up was the ever growing list of "don't"-s, its not fun to write in language where the design is so "loose" that to get reasonably correct/predictable code you always have to reference the list of "don't"-s.

And then having been a build maintainer on various projects the build and package management was a nightmare. Still vividly remember the first time I looked at Rust's cargo - mind blown :-)

The toolchain is completely unhelpful though. I can't make sense of half the compiler diagnostics that get spewed on my screen. If it wasn't for ChatGPT being able to reason about the compiler diagnostics, I'd be screwed.

> because it’s so flexible yet so expressive.

False, Python is much more flexible and expressive than C++

If you know C++ inside out, it's very tricky and frustrating.

I think the problem is that it's "easy" to learn it well enough that you think you know it pretty much all.

But you're still far off and you get frustrated!

The expressitivity is a big one for C++.

When I started working in C# the loss of expressiveness was one of the most painful things about it (and I started back in the 1.1 days).

Even something as simple as aliasing typenames, C# FINALLY got it in the most recent version.

Do you use a package manager?

Seriously hard to tell if this comment is sarcasm or not.

I find this interviewer overbearing

Why are you reposting the sidebar contents? Can you vouch for it?

Many years ago (1990-2005), I remember using C++ and whenever there was an error in some piece of code that involved strings (what should be a basic, fundamental data type), the error message referred to some complicated template type like std::basic_string<blah blah> and the simplest error was a really long message. It seems that no attention was paid to usability.

STLFilt, probably. https://www.bdsoft.com/tools/stlfilt.html

The '(youtube.com)' immediately following the title gives it away.