61–70 of 869 posts
I've seen this story several times. Once a language no longer has a developer pipeline, it becomes a language with no future. No matter how important and widely used. You wind up with jobs begging for qualified developers. Given how systems last, the language may survive indefinitely. As nobody dares migrate projects off of it. But employers will struggle more and more to find employees. The first language that this…
Rust should make the pool of C++ developers decrease exponentially in the coming decades. There's little reason to code a greenfield project in C++ unless it involves leveraging some niche libraries, and those niche libraries will eventually have Rust equivalents.
There's much more reason to do a greenfield project in C++ than Rust - experienced C++ hiring is still considerably easier! Not everything has a purely technical motivator.
There's lots of C++ programmers out there. But they're bottled up in FAANG, I think. So you have to be able to compete with that. Working at Google is on the whole a lot of C++. Major parts are moving to Go, certainly. But there's absolutely giant code-bases of pretty cleanly written C++ services, and most Googlers are quite proficient in it and there's whole teams at Google that work on improving C++ standards and t…
I'd modify this to say "All of this to say: if you want programmers, you need to pay competitive rates."
I worked in real estate for a while (as a software dev) and my boss, who was a realtor, always said "there's no house problem that price can't solve".
The labor analogy for me is "there's no labor shortage that salary can't solve". It may take some time (as people get trained up) but employers complaining about talent pool issues but paying get little sympathy from me.
For example, from a link in the article, consider this job https://www.efinancialcareers.co.uk/jobs-UK-London-C_Develop...
150k pounds for a job in London that is a tech lead position seem low to me.
Because Python pays more. Or Javascript. Or Ruby. More demand, more salary. Apart from finance, pay is lower than web languages. And finance is small. Embedded systems programming, that also uses the language, pays 30% less than web jobs from my last job hunting period. Employees may be leaving the embedded space (and C++) for web tech because of this. This is the feeling I get from my local job market (western Europ…
Because Python pays more. Or Javascript. Or Ruby. More demand, more salary. Apart from finance, pay is lower than web languages. And finance is small. Embedded systems programming, that also uses the language, pays 30% less than web jobs from my last job hunting period. Employees may be leaving the embedded space (and C++) for web tech because of this. This is the feeling I get from my local job market (western Europ…
> Employees may be leaving the embedded space Embedded opportunities have been slowly shrinking for years. For whatever combination of reasons, a lot of employers think that embedded work is easy or otherwise doesn’t require a large budget. It’s increasingly bizarre to get a well-designed IoT device with a very polished mobile app and web UI, then struggle with hardware factory resets and firmware upgrades because th…
Also, "This doesn't meet the current requirements, fix it with software!" The best one was when the case wasn't waterproof... How the fuck is software supposed to fix that? They literally expected the software team to work magic. A lot of pushback got that requirement kicked back over to the mechanical engineering team to address, but it took months. Moronic.
Rust should make the pool of C++ developers decrease exponentially in the coming decades. There's little reason to code a greenfield project in C++ unless it involves leveraging some niche libraries, and those niche libraries will eventually have Rust equivalents.
There's much more reason to do a greenfield project in C++ than Rust - experienced C++ hiring is still considerably easier! Not everything has a purely technical motivator.
Perhaps, but you can take experienced devs with a background in other languages and expect them to write solid Rust code. You probably only need to hire 1 or 2 people who already know Rust.
> People are seemingly scared away from the language by a terrible stigma: the notion that it is a legacy program. My personal experience: Universities (in Germany) simply stopped teaching C++. Most of it is now Python or C#.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having recently learned C++/C.. I don't see why it would be taught as a first language outside of specializations. The gains from C/C++ coding are vastly outweighed by the costs. The reality is that there is no good, agreed upon standard in C++ for how to manage memory... how would you teach this to junior engineers at university?
I learned programming in the 90's using C++. When someone expresses this intent I always ask the same question. Am I a supergenius or are you mistaken?