I've been programming for money for over 20 years and I grew up professionally writing C and then half-migrating to C++, because the latter very naturally captured lots of C patterns and allowed for more succinct expression of the same. It was lean, expressive and
elegant. Just needed a bit of Lisp-y closures and it would've been perfect.
And then things got completely out of hand. Elegance was nuked from the high orbit in favor of "power features" and abstraction. Fucking Boost (I can't tone it down, sorry), move semantics, ass-backwards closures, meta-template programming - C++ that was easy to understand became something that would normally come out of self-indulgent academic research.
Again, I've been using C/C++ for all my professional life, so it pains me to say this, but what it has become, it's... it's just horrible. Anything - C, D, Python, Rust - is cleaner and more elegant than C++ and just as powerful. If nothing else, I feel sorry for Bjarne. What could've been a gem of programming languages became http://i.imgur.com/1oGHYqi.jpg
And then things got completely out of hand. Elegance was nuked from the high orbit in favor of "power features" and abstraction. Fucking Boost (I can't tone it down, sorry), move semantics, ass-backwards closures, meta-template programming - C++ that was easy to understand became something that would normally come out of self-indulgent academic research.
Again, I've been using C/C++ for all my professional life, so it pains me to say this, but what it has become, it's... it's just horrible. Anything - C, D, Python, Rust - is cleaner and more elegant than C++ and just as powerful. If nothing else, I feel sorry for Bjarne. What could've been a gem of programming languages became http://i.imgur.com/1oGHYqi.jpg