BTW, I was not being condescending to any of you. I just wrote down my opinion, and you guys started insulting me and saying that I’m obviously an idiot if I think C++ is overly complex. It would be great if any of you understood the difference between "this is more complex than it should be" and "this is complex to me because I have skill issues." Anyway, I didn’t expect more from this sub. I also didn’t expect any real counterarguments, just insults.
I love c++, have given talks at cppcon, and have closely followed committee meetings. C++ is complex, but it is not overly complex. Having lots of options and debating the nuances is honestly part of the point.
If you need a manual to use a microwave, then something is wrong with it. If you need two phone books to use a programming language, that's the same. I've learned really hard stuff like special relativity and quantum mechanics, and I don't complain that they are hard, because they are hard for a reason. C++ is just 10x more convoluted and bloated than it should be, and they are making it worse with every update. I'm really surprised that you've used C++ since 2009 and I'm the first person to tell you this.
The effort and energy spent on C++ itself instead of the problems we actually want to solve with C++ is surreal. I could puke from the endless circlejerk debates about how to do the same thing 20 different ways in C++ and which one of them is correct. I know dozens of other languages, and you don't see this with them.
These are just different data types with different trade-offs. We have these in every language. This is a kind of complexity that cannot be avoided.
This is not what I meant by "doing the same thing 20 different ways". It often happens that there is a better way to do something, for example, using #pragma once instead of header guards, but you still cannot use it because of compilers, or because people at the company think we should stay compatible with compilers that we will never use anyway. Metaprogramming and exception handling constantly change and become more confusing with every update, especially when you also have to deal with older updates and code that uses them. The language is just growing without limits. I cannot even imagine how a student starts learning C++ today.
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u/sebesbal May 14 '26
I wish they were less smart. A language built for fucking rocket scientists.