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C++ takes decades to master (thelemmy.club)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] 62 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (22 children)

My first ever big boy language was C++ (after Basic, and Logo, does anyone remember that lol). I was in middle school, tried to self-learn from learncpp.com, only to realize that I had mostly learned C, with cin-cout instead of printf-scanf. So I just decided to migrate to C. Nowadays, I mostly code in Rust, Go, and Python. But my experience with C has been extremely helpful. Can't say the same about C++ though.

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  • [–] 25 points 3 months ago (13 children)

    C++ is useful for learning object oriented programming: Describing what really happens in constructors and destructors, the pros/cons of reference counting and how it actually works (using std::unique_ptr)

    These are things that most modern languages try to hide/abstract away, but the underlying problems and limitations never go away, but with C++ you'll have a better understanding of why they happen.

    However, if you go down the rabbit hole of Template Metaprogramming, I agree with the original post: it takes decades to learn and really only useful exploitable in C++.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago* (8 children)

    I've always preferred the functional approach to programming, so OOP never really intrigued me. That's one of the reasons why I never liked C++ or Java, but instantly fell in love with Rust. It lets me do a lot of functional style programming, while still being somewhat practical. (I'm looking at you, Haskell.)

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago* (6 children)

    I've been a long time believer that some problems are better solved via OOP, others through functional programming. The perfect language would be a successful blend of the two.

    Many popular OOP languages are horribly lacking on FP or it looks like an eyesore (golang, python, etc). ...and FP languages trying to do OOP are kinda awkwards (see common-lisp).

    I thought Crystal Lang (a statically type checked dialect of Ruby) was going to be the "perfect language"... but the compile time performance and the lack of 3rd party libraries (like an aws SDK) really made it hard to use.

    Hearing what you said about Rust has renewed my hope.

    That said, I did notice that features like Coroutines have been "experimental" for nearly 9 years.

    I hope I'm missing something obvious, but how would you create any sort of heavy-lifting, long running, multi-session daemon/application without having some sort of asynchronous mechanism that goes beyond threading (which is limited to the number of cores the host machine is running).

    edit: cleaned up a few thoughts (prematurely hit submit)

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

    I don't think there's an std-way of doing it, but the Rust ecosystem has this thing where people usually settle around one library. In this case, it is tokio. Afaik, most async stuff is done using tokio. What little async I've used, it's been using tokio or some library like actix-web that uses tokio under the hood.

    Also, side note, I never understood the idea of why golang is ugly. I think it's fine, except for maybe the repeated if err != nil guards. Those are ugly. I wish it used additive types for error handling.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    As a passionate Golang hater, I can gladly explain!

    • It's not just the repeated if err != nil, even though that's already bad enough. But the really fucked up part is the := bullshit. It makes moving code around unnecessarily annoying, and it's telling that few other languages share Golang's approach.
    • The lowercase/uppercase rules for private/public stuff is theoretically not a horrible idea, but it makes the code look much more inconsistent. I find _ much easier to read, and this leaves upper/lower to signal other details. But I see that this is mostly personal preference.
    • Fairly basic operations take much, much more code than they should (e.g. deserializing JSON while handling extra args, or basic functional operations - though that should change sooner rather than later with the new generic methods, right?)
    • The decision to initialize every non-pointer primitive with the "bottom value" (or whatever it's called again) makes sense in isolation, but it's really unfortunate that they don't support additive types, because this means a bunch of common tasks need to use pointers, and unfortunately the type system is worthless when it comes to preventing segfaults caused by bugs with pointers.
    • I find that most Go libraries have basically no documentation, if you're lucky you get an example that might vaguely be related to whatever you want to know. I've had much better experiences in other languages.

    All in all IMO most Go code is 5x longer than necessary to actually express itself in a readable manner, all because the language still doesn't have proper error handling or generic support (until recently at least). At the same time it's fairly inflexible, the type system is still shallow and basic, and it's still way too easy to shoot yourself in the foot.

    The only good thing Go has going is the single file deployments, but I'll gladly spend one hour of every remaining day of my life setting up containers, if it means I never have to touch anything Go again.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    Fair enough. I'm not a professional programmer, so I guess I won't understand your frustration with long term maintenance of Go code. I do agree that it can be unnecessarily verbose. Writing something as simple as an http server takes a long time. Also, the dependency management sucks. It can't seem to decide if it wants to be declarative or not.

    I do like that it's dead simple though, and that the standard library has most of the basic stuff. I've mostly replaced the need for Python with Go, for small CLI apps. Nowadays, I only use Python when I have to use some specific library, mostly for mathematical computing.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    some problems are better solved via OOP, others through functional programming. The perfect language would be a successful blend of the two.

    That was the entire goal of Scala and I would say Scala both accomplished it and is a worse language for doing so. Some OOP principles are just bad, namely subtyping. Rust genuinely does blend OOP and Functional in a better way. Instead of classes and interfaces with lambdas you have algebraic data types and type classes with for loops.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    Quite a while ago, I wrote this to document my understanding what OOP actually is.

    This sentence at the end is interesting:

    On the other hand it sounds unlikely that there will be a popular language without object-oriented influences some day, so at least minimal syntax-level support is desirable.

    Rust was published like one year later and it can be considered popular by now. Does Rust support OOP via traits? Kind of yes, but so does Haskell with typeclasses.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago

    I don't disagree that the language is a great way to build an understanding of object lifecycles, but in my experience C++ ctors and dtors are also the biggest source of confusing footguns I've ever encountered in any programming language.

    Separately, template metaprogramming is a whole different beast. It's an extremely powerful tool, but to me it also feels like finding the correct incantation to get it to do exactly what you need for more complex scenarios. It can be really fun if you know what you're doing, but it also tends to make me very upset at the compiler when my incantations are a bit off.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    I inherited a supposedly finalised "core" handling data, but only booleans were dealt with and I had to code the other ones. It was coded in template metaprogramming (MSVC & gcc 4.8 😨), just thinking about it gives me chills down the spine!

    It's a bit fascinating (and your normal template problems if you have any will vanish and your loved one will return) but it's, IMO, not for large projects 😬. Impossible to debug (not every error is caught compile time after all).

    printf was coded like that (with the variadic template "..."), I don't remember if it was libraries for the old compilers or the new ones... But that's a fun way of checking it out IMO!

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

    Yay, Logo

    I used it way too long because my clumsy ass couldn't get another IDE to work

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Memory unlocked!

    If you are feeling nostalgic the project is still there, with the same old interface from the past: https://fmslogo.sourceforge.io/

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    I used Imagine by Logotron (Czech-localized, including keywords - yes, with diacritics) as my IDE, and I still have it installed because the accompanying graphics editor (LogoMotion) is just so good. I never got to the OOP part because the textbook didn't cover it and there are no materials onlone about the Czech version (not even a keyword dictionary), and I couldn't speak English back then. I stopped programming for way too long because I couldn't get another IDE working and I didn't know how to make arrays and text I/O in Logo, the tutorials I had stopped at variables.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    Try the c++23 standard. There's been a lot of cross pollination. Contrived example follows:

    #include <format>
#include <numbers>
#include <print>
#include <string>

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
    double pi = std::numbers::pi;
    std::string fstr = std::format("{}, {:>.2}, {:>.5}, {:>.10}", pi, pi, pi, pi);
    std::string h = "Hello";
    std::string w  = "World";
    std::println("{}, {}!", h, w);
    std::print("This won't have a {},", "newline");
    std::println(" but this will add it."); // Add a newline.

    // Can't put a non-constant string as the first argument to
    // print or println so they can be checked at compile time.
    std::println("{}", fstr);
    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}
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