Stroustrup: C++ is a waste of time

This is a well-known hoax: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/648998/is-c-a-waste-of-ti...

Personally, I still found it enjoyable to read. It raises some real problems with C++.

Nice file name. 'joke_19980216_01.txt'

funny. i was totally trolled for the first paragraph or two.

did anyone else immediately have to go check how big hello world builds?

elipse@lappy:~/Desktop$ echo "#include<iostream> using namespace std; int main() { cout << \"hello world\"; } " > hello.cpp elipse@lappy:~/Desktop$ g++ hello.cpp elipse@lappy:~/Desktop$ ls -lh a.out -rwxr-xr-x 1 elipse elipse 8.8K Dec 6 13:46 a.out elipse@lappy:~/Desktop$

not half a meg, but still kinda big if you stop and think about it, but the c way with printf was only a couple of hundred bytes smaller...

Can't tell if serious...

Clear hoax, but I do find it interesting, because C++ engineers do seem to be outearning people in more high-level languages, which is surprising not because it's low-level but because it's a bad language at its level of abstraction (C, on the other hand, fits its level well). I don't know of anyone cracking $250k in anything other than C++ (usually in low-latency trading) or Java.

It does seem, for now, that using a painful language increases one's compensation potential at least at the high end. I suspect that that will change in the future, but it may not happen quickly.