> your reputation as a programmer will be lower if you don’t know it
I could learn C++, or I could learn Smalltalk, Scheme and Haskell in the same time and mental space.
Why You Should Know C++
41–50 of 63 posts
Re: Why You Should Know C++
#42When I first started programming, people would say the same kind of things for learning some form of assembly. 10 years from now people will probably be making an article like this for Java and C#.
Re: Why You Should Know C++
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
C is the lingua franca of computer languages. You can create bindings for almost any language if you have a c library. A lot of system libraries are in fact C, not C++: think of stuff like zlib, curl, openssl, libxml, iconv.. Sure, if you know C++ well, you'll be able to do C, but learning C++ is that much harder than C, that it's often not worth the effort. You'll be able to interface with most libraries once you kn…
Learning C++ is not much harder than learning C. The difficulty in both languages lies in pointer manipulation and understanding the system below, it does not lie in using classes or templates. If you are a web developer who wants to interface with libraries then your approach is right, but if you are trying to develop a complete piece of software, then what you are saying is just wrong. You seem to be locked down by…
The difficulty in both languages lies in pointer manipulation and understanding the system below, it does not lie in using classes or templates.
That's utterly untrue. The low-level details of C++ are mostly the same as C's, unless you want to write a shared library in C++ and thus need to extern the C++ symbols, or need to worry about the details of the object-system implementation like vtables, or need to mess with streams and layer them over some communication medium.
What makes C++ fucking hard is the syntax explosion that feels like cleaning up a New Year's Eve confetti with your bare sweaty hands, the template voodoo, and the design patterns that they have tacked on the language to make it more palatable to Satan.
To make it worse, the language is both broad and deep. You can't learn C++ by reading the standard. You have to dip into the culture of one of the big vendors, or schools of programming, to find out what subset of the language is to your liking. Are you writing Bjarne's C++ or GoF's or Alexandrescu's? or perhaps you would prefer to old HP/STL/Meyer C++ to the new kitchen-sink BOOST C++?
Contrast this to Common Lisp, which is a very broad but relatively shallow language; you can read the first few sections of every chapter of the manual and come off a good Lisper, go back and dig deeper and you only get better. OO, functional and procedural Lisp looks relatively the same. If you don't understand a construct, you look up the documentation of the symbol, see its evaluation model and presto. C++? You don't see what's being implemented because higher-level designs are being kludged and modeled with dickish, brittle and contrived tools -- they have no way out of this, as the language insists on C pseudo-similarity and refuses to adopt any kind of clean macro system; they're running out of syntax and CPP is unforgiving. Understanding C++ code then becomes a matter of psychological profiling of the author and even scholarly exegesis and deconstruction ("What did he intend to say?", etc.) requiring a level of empathy hard to muster when you're, in fact, wishing ill and misfortune on the bastard who forced you to look at this mess.
Re: Why You Should Know C++
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
C99 has single line // comments. It also has the restrict tag. About the idea of C++ as a better C, See "C++ - The Forgotten Trojan Horse". ( http://ejohnson.blogs.com/software/2004/11/i_find_c_intere.h... ) If you're using C++ for the STL, keep in mind that the ML languages (OCaml, SML) also have compile-time parametric data structures, and they infer and check their usage for you. They also have a proper module sys…
The ML family of languages is my favorite (second only to C++, natch.) but their brand of parametric polymorphism is equivalent in C++ to MyTemplate (or, if you like boost, MyTemplate > would be more accurate.) They are not the same as MyTemplate . This is by choice of ML language implementors, as they see it as a defect of C++ that every template instantiation has to be compiled independently. Instead, they turn sta…
This is why I said "pretty fast", not necessarily faster than C++. Using ML means trading a small percentage of C++'s raw speed for code that can be debugged, adapted, etc. with much less trouble. I have found this to be a more than reasonable trade-off in virtually all cases.
Re: Why You Should Know C++
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Windows API is an array of functions that can be called the same from C as from C++. Microsoft provides several object oriented wrappers for this API, and it's very rare that any significantly large application is not calling the API over some kind of wrapper.
No, I think it's C. It's written in C and was (at least initially) designed to be called from C code. I think #ifdef __cplusplus followed by extern "C" doesn't make a C API C/C++. Also the fact that there are several Microsoft and third-party wrappers out there doesn't make it any less C, at least in my opinion.
I did not say it's C++. It's C, but it's rare that it's used directly as C.
Re: Why You Should Know C++
#46I like to use C++ just as a better C. Things like single line // comments and not having to declare all your variables at the top of your functions is really useful. STL is also really useful in that you don't have to (badly) reinvent basic data structures like vectors and maps. Of course, STL also means reading compiler errors that are pages long... :-/
STL is way out of the realm of "just better C". It's pretty much several new concepts: object-oriented programming and aspect-oriented programming.
Unfortunately, this also means that working with any real C++ code base will involve working with code written by people most familiar with a different 20% of the language than you.
I find my time is much better spent writing in a more flexible language that integrates well with C (I like Lua), and saving C for the small parts that actually need it. Also: I can think of few language that have worse object systems than C++. It's not exactly a shining example of OO done right.
Often, an efficiency issue is better remedied by a fundamentally different design, rather than just "pushing harder", and C++ makes it particularly easy to lose sight of this.
Re: Why You Should Know C++
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes you will. It's better to learn C++ straight up, because the things you learn there will help you become a better modern developer compared to just C. The core differences between C and C++ (apart from the entire object oriented thing) are easy for any competent developer to pick up. Were they difficult for you to understand?
The stylistic differences are wide. Learning to for instance do C style APIs using opaque types, extended macro-fu, broader use of function pointers, etc. are the sorts of non-obvious things that good C developers do that you'll mostly miss working just on C++ code-bases.
I don't think that non-obvious and "good developers" should be joined together in one sentence. It's possible to do a lot of macro magic, it's possible to do a lot of function manipulation, but this is not good development. This is efficient development when you are working with projects or systems that require that sort of thing (maybe large dataset manipulation or embedded systems), but in my opinion, doing those things is bad programming.
The reason is simple: They are difficult to understand. Code is communication, and there are two listeners - and when you are pushing function pointers around using macros, the human is going to have huge problems understanding what you are trying to achieve.
So I don't think exploiting particular features of a language to extreme levels when it is unneccesary makes you a good programmer in that language - I actually think it makes you worse.
It's like writing a book - you have a certain vocabulary at your disposal, and you can say almost anything you want with that vocabulary. There are different levels of obscurity in the words you use you can reach - you gain in expressiveness, but you narrow your audience. When you write a book for molecular biologists, then the particular terms you use should not be the same as when you write a biology textbook.
That's why I think that one can be a good C programmer without going much deeper than the C subset commonly used in C++.
This is part of my general philosophy in programming - clarity, simplicity and structure first, efficiency second. The machines will catch sooner or later, anyways.
Re: Why You Should Know C++
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Learning C++ is not much harder than learning C. The difficulty in both languages lies in pointer manipulation and understanding the system below, it does not lie in using classes or templates. If you are a web developer who wants to interface with libraries then your approach is right, but if you are trying to develop a complete piece of software, then what you are saying is just wrong. You seem to be locked down by…
The difficulty in both languages lies in pointer manipulation and understanding the system below, it does not lie in using classes or templates. That's utterly untrue. The low-level details of C++ are mostly the same as C's, unless you want to write a shared library in C++ and thus need to extern the C++ symbols, or need to worry about the details of the object-system implementation like vtables, or need to mess with…
If I were to extend C by adding python style classes on top of it, I would end up with roughly the same number of keywords. I don't think it's true that C++ has a lot of new concepts in the language itself.
I agree that C++ is very library oriented, and it changes your approach to the language, but this is not a fault of the language itself, this is a side-effect of its very wide popularity.
If you have a pattern used by a library, then that is the fault of the library, but not a fault of the language. The language does not come with any patterns.
Templates in C++ are not good, but they are not widely used in the real world. Most people ignore them, and that's good so.
Re: Why You Should Know C++
#49If you want to be a master of the machine use C/C++; if you want to be a slave use Java; If you want to be a slave of a slave then its C# for you. Simple :)
( Disclaimer : My comments are limited to only the above 'popular' languages in discussion. Also I program purely on *nix, so I am not aware of your other dark or better worlds out there )
Re: Why You Should Know C++
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difficulty in both languages lies in pointer manipulation and understanding the system below, it does not lie in using classes or templates. That's utterly untrue. The low-level details of C++ are mostly the same as C's, unless you want to write a shared library in C++ and thus need to extern the C++ symbols, or need to worry about the details of the object-system implementation like vtables, or need to mess with…
If I were to extend C by adding python style classes on top of it, I would end up with roughly the same number of keywords. I don't think it's true that C++ has a lot of new concepts in the language itself. I agree that C++ is very library oriented, and it changes your approach to the language, but this is not a fault of the language itself, this is a side-effect of its very wide popularity. If you have a pattern use…
Templates in C++ are not good, but they are not widely used in the real world.
Depends on where your "real world" is. C++ usages are vendor and library dependent. My C++ code looked different in MFC/COM/ATL than in FLTK and that too was different than Qt. Choosing the right C++ becomes a matter of choosing the right vendor, and if that choice isn't up to you, well, tough luck.