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Re:Thriving in a Crowded and Changing World: C++ 2006–2020 [... by lelanthran on Friday July 16, 2021 @06:43AM (#27854846)
> Nevertheless, C++ is basically unbeatable generally.

If your only measurement is "how many different distinct features are specified by the language", then, well, yes ... C++ is unbeatable for the number of different ways to do one thing.

If the measurement is instead "how much effort is needed to know enough C++ to move from team to team?", then the outlook is bleak for C++. Because the language itself is so huge, everyone uses a different 80% of it.

C++ is hard to use, because to use any of it, you basically have to know all of it, which is a rather large surface area to cover.

Is there another language that requires as much language-knowledge as C++? I can't think of one.

Re:Thriving in a Crowded and Changing World: C++ 2006–2020 [... by sseagull on Friday July 16, 2021 @10:02AM (#27856303)
But the proposed solution to that seems to be "learn more languages", which is not exactly effortless.

I feel some people love learning new languages, while others just want to get shit done. C++ seems geared towards the latter - I don't (always) want to futz around with a new language, ecosystem, and toolchain when I just want to get something out the door. Programming is a tool, not an end for a lot of people.

Re:Thriving in a Crowded and Changing World: C++ 2006–2020 [... by mempko on Friday July 16, 2021 @01:25PM (#27858715)
Exactly. I've been coding C++ for 22 years and feel I know less now then I did back then. The language has grown. But at the same time I feel 10x more productive in it than 20 years ago.
Re:Thriving in a Crowded and Changing World: C++ 2006–2020 [... by jahnu on Friday July 16, 2021 @07:09AM (#27855038)
I respectfully disagree. Once you know the core, say 25%, which I've seen devs with 5 years experience in unrelated language pick up basics in a couple of months of full time practice, and then become pretty good at after a year, then switching between teams that use different parts of the remaining 75% is as painless as anything else. I've seen people struggle way more with differences in web development dev envs than c++ and JavaScript is supposed to be simple! (It is but all the rest of the complexity of work comes along for the ride too no matter the language.)

Of course c++ isn't the right tool for every job and as each decade passed there are more languages that do certain tasks better.

Re:Thriving in a Crowded and Changing World: C++ 2006–2020 [... by pjmlp on Friday July 16, 2021 @07:50AM (#27855305)
Java, C#, F#, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, OCaml, Python, Ruby,... come to mind.

Yes doing "Hello World" is much easier than C++, however when one actually dives into the ecosystem, programing culture and language improvements since they exist, then it isn't that cut clear to keep skills up to date.

Try to move someone stuck in the ways of Java 7 into a team taking full advantage of Java 16, language, runtime features and libraries.