Rant rant rant
What is Blogvent? (tl;dr I am going to write one post a day for all of December as a way to practice writing.)
My C++ Journey
I love C++ but it’s not my first programming language. That honor would either go to PHP’s ability to just copy paste stuff into a file and have Apache run that code no matter where it is, or whatever language mIRC was using as I copy pasted my way into annoying people online.
I got into C++ at univeristy, as for some reason unknown to me, they just happened to be teaching C++ for most of their courses in Computer Science.
This is at the start of C++11, or as it was called C++0x.
Gone were all the quirks I had no idea were quirks, but good, good that they’re gone. I’m glad. Gone was auto_ptr. Good riddance I say, not knowing why it was a problem.
I got some sort of handle of the language in the early classes. Seemed fine. Pointers and references were tricky but after throwing enough & or * at the problem would probably fix it.
It’s not a thing I think about anymore. I can kinda program day to day C++ without thinking too much about the general language features.
But when you get to the edges, that’s where I need to google, or yell on Twitter, but it’s usually fine.
I don’t find C++ bloated. I don’t think the direction it’s going is that bad. I do feel it caters a bit too much to library and compiler writers, but that’s usually the people who write the papers, so I can see why it happens.
So what’s going on?
But why do I wonder if there is C++ in my future?
Because there’s other stuff on the market that can help me solve the problems I want to solve. With equal speed or less fuss.
I’m not a library person. I’m not this hyper low level person.
I like using computers to solve problems, to create soltions for clients, and I’m not sure I see C++ being the thing for me in the future, at least in the longer term.
Will there be some C++ along the way? Sure. I still love the language and actually I’d be happy to teach it to someone who wants to learn, because if they feel it’s worth and it fits their problem solving style, it then I’d be honored to help them along that path.
But for me? In the next few years? I’m not sure.