Wrapping Up 2021. Leaving C++

When you slip up socially, like making an awkward comment - did you do it because you just don't care? Or were you trying to make a well-received comment, and you're just less adept at socializing than you'd like to be?

My guess is that socializing just isn't your strength. But I'm sure you're well intentioned! Very few people try to do things because they want to be stupid. And it hurts when people assume that you're bad at socializing because you somehow want to be bad at it - that isn't true!

But here we have a thing that you're good at (efficient C++) and yet you've made some assumptions about others that feel the same. You "...have to deal with things that are less effecient because someone just didn’t give a damn." Do you think it's really because the people involved don't care? Perhaps they're bad at it. More likely, they have different things they're optimizing for than efficiency. But whatever the reason, the least likely reason is that they don't care about doing things well. Even people who struggle with something typically want to do it well.

I think the OCPD is one thing - but the thing I would work on fixing first is to just assume the best out of others. Friends will drop out of touch with people who consistently assume the worst of them. You need empathy - few people are trying to do the wrong thing. They are doing the right thing given a different set of values; rarely, they're doing the wrong thing because they're incapable. But almost never are they doing the wrong thing out of a preference for not doing the right thing.

I write some c++, as well as some amount of code in other languages. I wouldn't consider myself part of the cpp community. c++ is hands down the most frustrating to deal with, and leaves me asking why I'm doing it to myself.

The answer is, of course, that there are some things that're really only possible in c and c++...and however much I'd typically prefer to just do something in c, c++ has a way of luring you in with the promise that it'll be just a bit more ergonomic and safe....And it is, kinda.

But sometimes it feels like the entire cpp community is one giant case of self induced Stockholm syndrome...They wont change the fundamental things that make it difficult.

On the flip side, there seems to be some fetishization of incidental complexity. I have the impression that many in the community pride themselves on how smart they must be to work with such a difficult language, without considering that there could be a language that's significantly easier to use with the same benefits. Or using that difficulty as a gatekeeping mechanism to insulate the community from the less-smart.

I'll posit this: c++ isn't hard, it's just frustrating because you need to parse incomprehensible error messages, or seemingly arbitrary limitations, or have some ridiculous number of overloads...

And then the naming that they decide on in committee...I'm gonna pick on `std::unordered_map`. The name describes it based on what it is not. The reason it's named that is naively, just because `std::map` was already taken by a tree implementation. I don't know why they couldn't have chosen something like `std::hash_map`, or something. The template parameters declare a hash _functor_ is necessary...so the reasoning that you might have an unordered map implementation that doesn't use hashing is up in smoke...

...I'll stop there, because I could probably keep going for quite some time. My point is that c++ isn't hard, cpp is dumb. It's dumb because it makes some of the simplest things contorted into ordeals.