MIT Tech Review has this article about Stroustrup’s views on current state of C++, programming etc. Stroustrup, the C++ inventor, seemed to answer quite candidly.

One particular comment is interesting.

That said, C++ has indeed become too “expert friendly” at a time where the degree of effective formal education of the average software developer has declined. However, the solution is not to dumb down the programming languages but to use a variety of programming languages and educate more experts. There has to be languages for those experts to use–and C++ is one of those languages.

It’s true that C++ is actually expert friendly and is some times intimidating to a newbie programmer. It’s been a while since I did “real” object-oriented programming in C++, but whenever I tried to use it, I felt like it had too much power. This quote from Stroustrup himself puts it succintly.

It’s easy to shoot yourself in the foot with C. In C++ it’s harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you do, you blow off your whole leg.

There are endless articles about the power of C++ and how it makes it difficult to use. I think for large projects that are not performance-critical a language like Java might be more beneficial.

On a side note, my favourite language these days is Python. Obviously, it’s ten times slower than C++, but can get the work done with 100 lines written in 10 minutes.

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