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Comment by googlryas | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, but Herb Sutter is too smart for his own good. He should not be involved in language design meant for mortals. I mean, who can honestly say both "For me, ISO C++ is the best tool in the world today to write the programs I want and need", but then also "I want to make C++ 10x simpler/safer/more toolable"?

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For a class of problems, there's basically two options of language to use that would fit the requirements, C++ and Rust. While Rust is promising and getting some traction, saying that it's the clear winner in all aspects would be a stretch. So therefore there's a lot of people who end up with your first statement. And given the kinds of problem where it's the best tool, a lot of those would end up actually interested in the second statement. However, of course most people wouldn't have the opportunity to do so. We're lucky that there are people that end up with all three like Herb Sutter, IMO, or we'd be stuck with 98 semantics... (I guess it would have helped Rust getting popular faster though...)

What makes you think that these two statements are exclusive?

I don't mean to say they are mutually exclusive, merely that it takes a very smart person to be able to say both. For most people, a language that is 10x more complex than a language with ideal simplicity and safety, is too difficult for them to understand - or at least too difficult for them to understand without putting in years of study and practice, something which is not reasonable for most programmers.

My impression is that many people use C++ because they need to, but not because they want to.

Java and C# fucked up in that they thought that people really loved the objects, but missed that actually people really hated the pointers and the oo part was mostly a crutch to lessen thr memory safety burden.

And their development in the last 15 years is just trying to escape the oo cage they were put in.

Something that fixed C++ would have been a godsend in 2004. Nowadays... just a nice thing to have.

Well, you did get a whole bunch of fix for C++ in 2011...

They were following C++ "best practices" of the era.

Gang of Four patterns, Turbo Vision, OWL, MFC, Motif++, PowerPlant, AppToolbox, VCL, Qt, wxWidgets, Telligent, CORBA, DCOM,....

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