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Comment by xroche | Hacker News Reader

"Less harmful alternatives" seems in many cases to be "Exotic technologies hardly used by anyone, simply unusable in any serious environment". In some cases, comically wrong: C as a better alternative to C++ ? Did I totally miss the obvious satirical nature of the page ?

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C is a better alternative to C++ for many applications. If it weren't, it wouldn't still be so widely used.

It's still used today because (1) of historical code and (2) the fact many people are fluent with it (including me). But this is a terrible languages in most cases.

C is relatively simple, C++ is so complex practically no-one understands all of it. Many C++ features are "OOP kool-aid" and do more harm than good (if people would just realize you can pass around pointers to C struct's, which is all the "object orientation" necessary for 99% of the software in the world)

You can do in C++ everything you can do in C. You don't need to use C++-specific stuff.

Also, using your logic, C constructs are nothing more than just assembly with more overhead. Why not just use assembly instead? Answering this question will probably answer your question about OOP stuff.

>You can do in C++ everything you can do in C.

By that logic, we should all use "omniglot", one language in which all the top 100 languages are first-class supported. What could possibly go wrong :D

I guess you mean UNCOL.

They probably mean in places that C or C++ would be used.

Embedded systems should be made 'simple' and C++ is the opposite of that.

But I agree with your comment. I found the alternatives equally as harmful, especially as they have a smaller community.

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