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Comment by chaxor | Hacker News Reader

I don't know anything about C++ really, but I have been interested in learning it several times. The biggest deterrent for me has been the huge number of languages that you have to know to learn c++ it seems. Every new version comes with so many different features and seemingly (by looking for example repos on git) different paradigms that it essentially feels like many different languages.

This is probably one of the biggest reasons I may turn to rust over C++ - simply less features creep due to less time being around.

Can you comment on how wrong I am about my feelings this way?

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Yes, I understand, I would probably feel the same if I wanted to learn C++ all at once and for its own sake. Luckily, I have never had to do such a thing. Indeed, I may never learn C++ in its entirety, and I may even miss some "important" pieces, but I am OK with that. I am very comfortable using C++, and I still continue picking up pieces of wisdom here and there - as I go. My advice, learn by example, start with a small project and go from there.

Learning/teaching C++ is definitely a sore spot about it. Many still teach C++98 which is... Bad. It'd be like still teaching Java 1.3. yeah the syntax is the same basic shape, but pretty much everything else is different.

C++11 and newer are all largely one "category" in terms of recommendations. The CppCoreGuidelines is a good place to cover all that, but it's not a from-scratch introduction by any means

Not wrong, but its a feature, rather than a problem.

C++(17+) template based metaprogramming far more powerful and generic than what you can do in eg rust. Converting eg a rust or go or python, or julia, etc library into c++ is pretty straightforward, just use appropriate overloads, and a few template tricks, and you can mostly copy the code directly. But copying between these, or from c++ is much harder.

The solution is to learn one approach suitable for the problem you have right now, then widen over time. The many languages of c++ as you describe is less of a problem, the problem is that some approaches are deeply and fundamentally flawed, but still in common use.

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