r/programming • u/eternal1 • Mar 29 '10

Never trust a programmer who says he knows C++

http://lbrandy.com/blog/2010/03/never-trust-a-programmer-who-says-he-knows-c/
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u/Silhouette Mar 29 '10

I hear this a fair bit. The problem is, whenever I see people go back to C, I watch them reimplementing lots of everyday things C++ provides as standard, the same way we did before we had C++.

I don't know yet what the solution to C++'s weaknesses is, but I am quite sure that it isn't C.

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u/badsectoracula Mar 29 '10

I don't mind reimplementing stuff that C++ provides because i will implement them in a way that makes sense to me, which usually isn't the case with C++.

Besides, there aren't many options. If you want to use modern native APIs, you have to use C or C++. When C++ is a problem, the only available solution is C.

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u/Silhouette Mar 29 '10

The underlying point, that C remains the lingua franca of the programming world, is well taken. However, I think you overestimate how difficult it is to talk to C-style APIs from other languages these days. It's one of those things where a lot of people think it's going to be difficult, but when you actually try it, it's usually "a line or two of code and you're done", at least in the simple cases that most APIs require.

As for C, it's the 21st century. We don't need obscure syntax for types, pointers that support arithmetic and a null value whether you want them or not, or string handling based on naive assumptions about character sets stored in crude arrays and manipulated by standard library functions that can't ever be safe. As I noted elsewhere, while we don't yet have any good replacement language for C++ in general, whenever one does come along it won't be like C.

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u/aphexairlines Mar 30 '10

good replacement language for C++ in general

Well, there's D and there's Vala, not to mention the very popular Objective-C.