Convincing C programmers to switch to C++: A look at human behavior (2016)

You start criticizing people for not believing you when you have one example comparing two different programs implementing an unspecified task on an unspecified compiler. This is ridiculous.

I mean, for crying out loud, your headlining video is a talk by a person who admits that he hasn't done the thing he's trying to convince people to do.

He says things like this:

"You don't want to wait for the market to take care of this, you would like to take some proactive steps to be able to make more of the people who should be using C++ willing to use it."

in the context of aerospace, which clearly he has no authority to speak on, since he misses one of the fundamental reasons why C++ is not popular or even acceptable in much of aerospace: implicit allocation. Implicit allocation is incredibly dangerous for high assurance systems. You really need to know exactly how much memory can be allocated, when, and what state the exact allocations will put the allocator in. C++ has some facilities to manage this, but man, it is easy to drop a plane from the sky by assuming that your allocation did what you wanted instead of verifying it.

It really doesn't matter if C++ is better or not. The article doesn't really even try to talk much about that at all. No matter what C++ may do, what it may change, what it may improve, how it may perform, how it can be simplified; it's almost impossible to convince C programmers to try C++ (or golang, or Rust, or D).

The article really is about how it's almost impossible to change someone's mind on any topic. Anyone who likes to engage in internet discussions is well aware of the phenomenon.

The problem with the STL is that you are always running into roadblocks when you try to compose things. I tried for a very long time to like the STL, and in the end it was very very good for one thing -- pushing me to look for something better.

I suspect things have improved some with the newer C++ standards (it's probably been almost 10 years since I gave up doing much of what I wanted to do in C++), but I much prefer Lisp, Scheme, and other languages now (most, if not all of them dynamically typed). Learning Lisp-family languages did indeed change how I program in other languages -- IMHO greatly improving the way I write code.

I might revisit C++ at some point, just to see what's happening there. I've only skimmed a few articles about the newer standards, and some things look promising. But it would probably take my involvement in a real-world project that uses C++ to get me to go there. I've just spent way too many frustrating hours trying to get things to work the way I wanted in C++.