Huh?

Why the Programming Language C is Obsolete. C obsolete? Really? Someone forgot to tell Linus. Bjarne Stroustrup is clearly a smart guy and by all accounts a nice guy so I hate to call his baby ugly but Damn! that’s one ugly baby.

At one point in my career I tried really hard to like C++ but I could never convince myself that it was anything other than a disaster. Perhaps I’m not smart enough to learn C++ adequately or to see its manifest superiority because it still looks ugly to me. One advantage of writing in C rather than a Lisp-like language or Python or Ruby is that you can get almost down to the metal. Lots of fine grained control but, of course, you pay for that by having to worry about memory management and other annoying details. Another advantage, for me, is that I have an excellent mental model of what code will be generated for a given C statement and can use that model to pick between alternative C constructs for a particular task.

C++ adds complexity and destroys my mental model but still requires me to worry about low level details like memory management. How is this an improvement? Object Oriented Programming I hear you say. Except that it’s not clear that the benefits are worth the costs as far as C++ goes. I know, I know, Apostasy! Still, I can’t help but agree with Linus on this.

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