Comment by psyclobe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by psyclobe | Hacker News Reader

If you dedicate a large amount of your career on C++, you can be quite productive writing very robust performant code, and these days its getting easier and easier.

I've been coding C++ since 1996, and to this day it is still a joy. I do a lot of back end node/typescript, and after dealing with the loosy goosy types and stuff in that language, coming back to a concrete hard core language that requires a much higher intellect to write in, is frankly refreshing.

I've always felt writing in C++ requires much more skill, and that alone is a very rewarding experience. I can tune things like arena allocators and make string operations insanely fast, things I agree most problems simply don't require, but still, its a craft that I feel very proud of conquering, and every day you learn something new.

So if you like a challenge, if you like learning, or maybe if you simply enjoy flexing your brain cells a bit more then most, C++ delivers that on all fronts.

As for whether it deserves a bad rap, that's a little too generalized of a statement, and it reeks of dogma. Ignore dogma, dive in, learn for yourself what you think sucks or doesn't.

"I've always felt writing in C++ requires much more skill, and that alone is a very rewarding experience. I can tune things like arena allocators and make string operations insanely fast, things I agree most problems simply don't require, but still, its a craft that I feel very proud of conquering, and every day you learn something new."

I worked with C++ for years, and I while I agree with the "every day you learn something new part", I also think that most employers and projects don't benefit all that much from time spent playing with your toy of choice, so to speak. That time that you spend learning about C++ each day, could go into learning about security, machine learning, graphics pipelines and a lot of other things.

I switched to a job where I mostly had to use C or Python, and I no longer obsess over my hammer. Unlike my C++-job, we don't go to C++ conferences and spend meeting after meeting talking about the language we're using. We attend conferences on crypto, machine learning, intrusion detection, and other things that could be useful to us.

I agree that there is a time and place for C++, but I feel so much more productive pulling that tool out of my toolbox AFTER I've identified a hot region of my code, and then using it where absolutely necessary.

> I've always felt writing in C++ requires much more skill, and that alone is a very rewarding experience. I can tune things like arena allocators and make string operations insanely fast, things I agree most problems simply don't require, but still, its a craft that I feel very proud of conquering, and every day you learn something new.

It's important to distinguish professional from hobby programming.

Challenge for the sake of challenge is certainly interesting/fun, but, no employer would pay employees to write programs in Brainfuck just because it's challenging, while it's ok in hobby programming, because the resources (=time) are virtually infinite. Of course, there's a value in an employer allowing a certain amount of extra resources for the employees' "growth for the sake of growth".

I think the article grossly misses the point of what makes C++ problematic, as it considers a programming language in the context of a single programmer solving a simple problem, while the real-world issues of C++ are in the context of a team and memory management of large programs.

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