C++ is as bad as they say it is. It is horrible, it is the worst language in the world ... except for all the other (a la Winston Churchill and democracy). The horrifical complexifications of C++ are just terrible, yet every one of them has a reason behind it. And also, the horrifical complexities are a bit more optional than the horrifical complexities of, say, Java. There isn't another language that has both the large-scale modularization given by OO and low-level efficiency of direct pointer manipulation and other C features. You get a vast library of available free code and a huge number of available tools to boot.

There is no other language for crafting large-scale, high performance tools. Java and C# can be just as fast but even fast Java has even greater verbosity overhead. And the scripting languages are great yet their resource overhead makes up for their compactness.

C++ is definitely a language of "big design". "Thinking in C++" is a mistake. You should think in your design and implement in C++. Unlike C, C++ seduces people to take the code for the design.

In any case, however flawed, the thing occupies a niche no other language can. I'm sorry.

So, there are really only a couple of problems:

• if you're Zed Shaw, you apparently want to cut two wheels off an 18-wheeler, and if you're Zed Shaw, you're likely to screw up and choose the drive wheels for your demented sacrifice. You do that, the sucker won't even roll.

• the stupid hatas who judge the race won't acknowledge your achievement. Something about the allowed types of bicycle. Is that analogous to how you can't run Ruby on a microcontroller with 1024 bytes of RAM, maybe? Because you can sure as fuck run C++ on it.

Anyway, direct pointer manipulation has been part of OO environments since the beginning. The purest current incarnation might be SqueakNOS (ever seen an IDE driver written in Smalltalk?) or SBCL's alien, but the most practical one is probably C++. Rust, Golang, and ATS seem like up-and-coming contenders.

Edit: oh, I forgot D. D's been an up-and-coming contender for more than ten years now.

Anyway, C++ is more like a construction system which can be used to make a bicycle, a semi, or a six-person tandem which could win the Tour De France.

Which is to say it's pretty clunky for a lot of things. But there are still things where both large scale organization and particular low-calls need to coexist - Databases, large graphics programs, etc. It's not impossible to write these in C or Java obviously but I'd still say C++ is cleaner.

Many of the reasons are legacy issues though like using dumb linkers and using the C preprocessor rather than a real module system. Templates are just a huge hack: manipulating the text of the source code to simulate generics and then abusing that feature to get meta programming.

One of the great mysteries of life is why there isn't another language that "has both the large-scale modularization given by OO and low-level efficiency of direct pointer manipulation and other C features" yet doesn't make the same mistakes as C++.

Objective C?

I often use a paraphrase of the Winston Churchill quote as well. There are probably many better languages for many other applications, however for high performance, cross platform large scale apps C++ is still the only game in town.

Joe's point that all the complexities have reasons behind them is a really good one. I'd suggest reading Stroustrup's "The Design and Evolution of C++" for more information.

• If you're calling a nonvirtual method, you don't have to pay the vtable cost at all, just the cost of passing this. And most methods in C++ are nonvirtual.

• A call through a vtable is typically a couple of indexed fetches and an indirect jump. Objective-C's mechanism involves a hash-table lookup, which is a bit slower.

Then code the performance sensitive parts in C and link it from the language that is best suited to express the solution.

The seriously complex and high-performance ITA system is written in Lisp.

And if you read Coders at Work, some of the criticisms of C++ suggest that the reason behind many of the C++ features is that Bjarne didn't want to say NO.

And I am happy to leave that particular niche of badness to C++ its own self.

But why do people insist on being able to do low and high level stuff in the same language? What's wrong with, say, using Python for high level stuff, and calling into C for low level tasks? C+Python is probably more convenient than C++.

I should have said "there is no other language which gives you the latitude for crafting high performance tools". You can indeed create serious high performance systems in a number of languages. The thing about most languages other than C and C++ is that things written in them tend to inherit their qualities - A system written in Java generally use Java's garbage collector. That works great for a number of things but it's still a constraint.

More of C++'s "modularization" features are optional than in the other languages so you have more latitude for creating your tools than anywhere else.

Of course, you do get the badness too...

Have you worked on it? Do you know this? Is it all written in Lisp, or are the parts that need high-performance and predictability written in C or C++?

There's a lot of language FUD out there. I say this as someone who owns OnLisp, and has spent a lot of time learning Lisp.

I wish that D1 was oficially killed, and a stable strict subset of D2 ("D1.5") was chosen as a recommended future-proof version.

There is a point though. C++ encourages obscure "too clever" constructs, and Java encourages excessive verbosity. But in both cases you can decide not to go there.

In C++, you don't have to declare a single class or create a single template.

Basically, any language with lots of modularity and lots of low level access is going to be big and have lots of features that are problematic in some situations.

No matter how I put it, I fail to see how C++ can be better than C + (Python or Lua or Haskell, with FFI). Is the concept of using 2 languages at the same time so scary?

That's not always an option if you've performance and memory constrains.

We're using Python only for high level scripting purposes.

If you've a performance critical function, where few data goes in, long computation and few data out, then it's perfect to implement this function in C and have a python function calling it.

But if you've a lot of data, then that's not an option. You just can't copy all the data to C and then after computation back to python, it will kill the performance gained by the C function implementation.

But also if you're trying to do complex operations on your application object hierarchy, Python will kill your performance. Only compare the time for a member/property access in Python and C++.

In all honesty, yes.

But consider this also. The advantage of C++, such as it is, is that the big, harry objects you are creating can call each with just about any calling conventions you chose and you can parameterize them at run time and compile time in whatever crazy way you'd like (pointers, templates, static objects, classes and ponies! (Ponies will only be standardized in C++_2015)). This is why Python, Lua and all each call c/c++ for extensions. But while there are many interesting scripting languages out there, there's no guarantee that any of these languages' calling convention, memory usage and constraints will be what your large objects need. Specifically, to effectively use a particular higher-level language you'd have to know from the beginning that said language's conventions would satisfy your needs from beginning to end.

Add to this the fact that C++ may not be a "good" programming language but that it's not that bad if used with discipline and understanding. The badness of c++ comes from the many, many ways you can shoot yourself in the foot - it still doesn't force to do anything. But how many subtle bugs can creep in if you're sloppy in passing raw pointers to some other language? And using any higher level language will involve forcing yourself to do a number of things that could prove problematic.

Yes, but it seems to be inevitable. Python + C. Haskell + C would be my choices for large scale modeling/data analysis. For apps involving a GUI, I would like to hear others thoughts.

Simply false: take a look at Oberon sometime.