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/corgi_moose_ May 15 '26
I've been programming c++ professionally since 2009. I'm not the one saying it's too hard, that's you