Reply #50: C++ has a lot of warts, but it too has its beauty. [View All]

[backscatter712]

It has the conundrum of having to remain 99+% (it's not 100%) bug-for-bug compatible with C, while adding more modern programming features like objects, polymorphism, higher-level data structures, that sort of thing. That forces some ... design compromises ...

You have to spend some time doing things like putting together code to handle operators for your objects, do constructors & destructors, etc. but once that's all put together, and you can start writing on a higher level, that's where it becomes beautiful.

OTOH, C++ is still a language that lets you dig down to your machine's bare metal if you want, and most other languages have far more difficulty with that.

But yeah, I remember a lot of having to write a bunch of code that I wouldn't have had to write using a higher level language (most recently, Ruby).

And keep in mind that when you're using C#, Java, or any of dozens of other more modern languages, you're using syntax that was first in C and C++.