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The one point that I see throughout the article is that every programming shop uses it's own subset of C++. Based on coding conventions, library usage, and business domain I have seen how the C++ code used in different companies can look like a different programming language altogether.

My professional experience outside C++ is limited, but I had always assumed this was the same for other languages as well. Is C++ really that much of a different animal from other languages?

In my experience with Java, the core language is small enough that every company pretty much uses the whole thing. Almost everyone has finally upgraded to using at least the Java 5.0 syntax by now. Occasionally you'll run across silly rules that prohibit things like the ternary operator or multiple returns, but those are minor differences.

The big differences come into play with frameworks. Depending on whether you're using Struts/JSF/Hibernate/Spring/etc your code may look completely different.

Occasionally you'll run across silly rules that prohibit things like the ternary operator or multiple returns

In avionics software, the ternary operator and multiple returns are often avoided to help ensure better code coverage during verification.

I don't think anyone is writing avionics software in Java? The automated code coverage tools I have seen handle those cases just fine.

They're only doing line-based coverage analysis?

"If Python or Java were implemented by Microsoft and GNU and four other smaller companies, you'd see the same horrible compatibility problems with those languages, too."

There are a lot of Java implementations, and I am not aware of serious compatibility problems between them.

The tiny differences in implementation between the sun and ibm vm's is a regular source of deep and painful frustration for some of the people I work with.

roughly 90% of the comments are from people who got a bad impression of C++ during the pre-standardization days

Zawinski and Thompson are good, but they are not 90% of Zawinski, Thompson, Bloch, Eich, Ingalls, Armstrong and Steele. You're completely misrepresenting the gist of the article.

The comments that really drop my jaw are the people who seem to hold up Java as a "better" C++.

http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html

but from its sketchy real-world performance

Oh please, don't start that flamewar with these kinds of uninformed, one sided utterances. Java performance has been more than fine for at least five years.

i'm not so sure about that.

a few months ago i was working on a project that involves amazon ec2 and s3. amazon gives you a bunch of command-line utilities, written in java, to perform various stuff. every one of them takes a second or two to start up, which really annoyed the heck out of me. that certainly wouldn't have happened if they were written in c++.

Startup time is, IMHO, not an essential part of a 'performance', as it is usually negligible compared to the time the actual execution (often in the order of weeks) takes. But granted, for the case of small apps performing short lived tasks, JVM startup adds a relatively large amount of overhead, which can be annoying.

I would have to agree. I have no doubt that anyone in the early days of C++ probably had a real bad experience and was right to tell people not to use it at that time.

I personally still use C++ because of the libraries and tools. With Boost, Qt, WebKit, valgrind, gdb, and others I am simply too productive in C++.

If someone told me I could only use the c++ standard library and no other libraries I could probably switch languages pretty quick. I can only imagine what it must have been like before when you got nothing.

The problem with C++ is not just bad implementation. Nowadays we have excellent, standard-compliant compilers for C++ but there are still rough edges. For example, the amount of garbage you get from template errors. You can "learn" to live with that, but it is something broken in the language, which won't be solved quickly. The amount of care you need to to write correct exception-based programs is another. And the failure of exceptions on method signatures show how we should really avoid some of C++ features.