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Comment by kovac | Hacker News Reader

And you can't really have a sane conversation with these guys either. I've never met a more arrogant programming community than the c++.

I wanted to learn more low level programming when I was a C# dev, and coming from an OOP background, I chose C++ (also I had encountered c++ in school as a first language) . Man, was it humiliating asking questions even on stack overflow. Apparently everything is obvious and I'm an idiot.

In any case, I dropped C++ (not because of the obnoxious community but the language felt so poorly designed, coming from C#) and turned to C. Its been so far an amazing experience learning from C community. They are deeply insightful about computers and genuinely willing to help new engineers. Very experienced and very high calibre c engineers were helping me out without trying to show off how much smarter they are than the rest of the world despite being clearly far better and smarter than I am.

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There are a lot of hardware engineers at my company that more or less occasionally use Python or C# to get their job done. I understand that those languages are the better choice for them and gladly help them with getting C bindings done for the odd library in our industry, and to understand some low level concepts such as CPU cache when they run into problems due to those.

I turned away from the C++ unity towards the Rust community because I saw the same issue as you, and am very happy about that decision.

It is somehow ironic to read this, given the heat given to newcomers on comp.lang.c and even the moderated one on Usenet.

I'm sorry, but using stackoverflow as a proxy for any "community" is giving that s(h)ite too much credit. It is infected with arrogant assholes regardless of the field.

(I guess I'm old and misanthropic but I would not seek out answers by asking on the internet, but instead by reading one of the many excellent books on C++. It's not some obscure hobby where you need the collective wisdom of old hands.)

Now, I've been doing C++ for 20+ years, and the only real way to get help/mentorship in my experience is people you work with. There are too many ways to do any given thing in C++ and what you want is to follow the coding practices of the team.

Well said.

One thing i have noticed is that many people trying to learn C++ (or any other language for that matter) don't even do the basic homework (eg. read a book) before asking questions. They expect everything to be spoon-fed and to "easily" understand it all. Even a little effort is too much. They simply lack the commitment and persistence to learn anything non-trivial.

So, your answer to somebody that found it difficult to get help from the c++ community is to first admit your are a misanthrope then direct the other guy to: go read some books and learn it for yourself!

Kind of proving the other persons point for them...

Read what I said:

1. stackoverflow is a bad "community" for any field.

2. I described how I would approach learning C++, based on my personality. I didn't "direct" anyone to do anything. Especially since I phrased it as a literal parenthetical.

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