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Comment by brian_herman__ | Hacker News Reader

This is why I'm not a C++ programmer, whenever I look at C++ I am amazed by how complex it is.

I've tended to like C++ as a user-space programming language, but I also tend to agree that its completely jumped the shark in the past decade. The current trope of "modern C++" programmers seem like the modern equivalent of the "pure OOP" crowd that infected C++ in the late 1990 early 2000's. The difference being that the modern C++ people have created what is pretty much worse in class syntax messes as they have tried to bolt concepts on using the template syntax. The shared_ptr<>/make_unique<> etc syntax is mostly nonsensical to anyone who isn't willing to buy into the cult. I'm really wishing those people had forked the language into C+++ or something so they could have actually deprecated all the syntax they hate and replaced it with what they believe to be the one true path, leaving the core C++ language mostly static, and fixing only the most critical of issues (as is C).

The current trope of "modern C++" programmers seem like the modern equivalent of the "pure OOP" crowd that infected C++ in the late 1990 early 2000's.

Precisely. Whereas the latter debate and complain about whether code is "OOP or not", and think non-OOP is a "bad practice", now we have the same contention around whether code is "pure C++" and dogma that "C with classes" is to be avoided. Hopefully the latter group will also eventually realise the silliness of it all.

I personally use C++ as "C with some extra features" and try to avoid most of the template insanity.

For this reason I went back to C and have been experimenting with Rust.

It’s a shame, because there are some places where C++ is a strict improvement over C, but you have to accept so much more baggage.

> The shared_ptr<>/make_unique<> etc syntax is mostly nonsensical to anyone who isn't willing to buy into the cult.

Could you explain how you would improve the shared_ptr syntax? I'm not sure you could make it that much simpler. std::shared_ptr<Something> seems pretty clear to me.

C++ is in some ways a job security mechanism. Careers are made on deep knowledge of the language. There are whole conferences about language details...

Better that than learning a new web framework every 6 months in perpetuity.

React was released in 2013...

And your code from 2013 pretty much certainly doesn't work anymore. Whereas C++11 is still perfectly adequate, and it works with the latest compilers.

Well as a serious C++ developer you'll probably want up-to-date and code in C++17 nowadays and that's similar to re-learning JS framweworks every few years. I guess the JavaScript world has it own "mechanisms" for job security.

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