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Re:Is C++ the Language of the Future? by tomp on Friday March 23, 2012 @02:21PM (#3746443)
Whenever I read such an article, I'm amused at how the authors seem to forget that there exist multiple areas of programming: web programming, application programming, industrial programming, real-time programming (finance), ...

C/C++ is popular only in the application programming and possibly industrial programming category. I believe that the latter category will become increasingly popular/important in the future (robotics, space travel, even consumer gadgets are becoming "smarter"), and C is a really bad language for any kind of life-critical software, mainly because it cannot be statically analysed (without significantly restricting the language features). Another thing is, in embedded systems, there's much less legacy code, so a new language for that field could very easily win over any existing ones.

Re:Is C++ the Language of the Future? by rbanffy on Friday March 23, 2012 @06:10PM (#3747611)
I can't see why being able to statically analyze the code brings it any closer to correctness - all it says is that you got your types right. In fact, switching to a lower-level language (as in "more detached from the problem you are trying to solve" such as C or C++) seriously harms your ability to even produce correct code.

Anyone who has chased a time-sensitive bug caused by data structures that mutate unexpectedly (be it by conflicting threads, be it by hardware changing it) can tell you that getting the types right won't help you a bit with making code that runs correctly on multi-core machines.

Re:Is C++ the Language of the Future? by pork on Friday March 23, 2012 @02:41PM (#3746528)
Sorry, which (widely used) language out there can be statically analyzed without restricting language features? And being difficult to statically analyze is hardly a reason to switch to C++.