Gregory Ewing <greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz>: > I'm completely convinced nowadays that there is *no* use case for C++.
While I wouldn't go quite that far (my most recent creation was written in C++; why? because the legacy support libraries were written in C++). However, C++ is like putting lipstick on a pig. In fact, C++ has so much makeup on you wouldn't even no there's a pig underneath it. The guiding principle in C++ language development is to take static type safety to the extreme. That overriding principle has sacrificed other objectives and made working with the language painful. And despite all that machinery, C++ omitted the simplest of things that Delphi/C# got right: delegates. Stroustrup apparently has never had to deal with callbacks; his thick books never made a mention of them last time I checked. Java was a masterful simplification of C++ although it, too, has taken on unnecessary weight in the form of annotations, generics and closures. I was exposed to Java very late in the game and was very positively impressed by the programming model. Too bad Java's ecosystem and stringent portability requirements make it difficult to integrate Java with other software. At any rate, Java makes for a great production server backend language with its high-level programming features coupled with great performance. Currently, my main programming languages are bash, Python and C. They work beautifully together and cover the whole gamut of programming needs from interrupt routines all the way to test automation. Over time, I've shifted more and more weight from bash to Python because Python's predictable, flexible semantics has turned out to be worth its clunky multiprocessing facilities. Python exposes the OS facilities so doing the "right thing" in the linux ecosystem is very possible (unlike in Java). Python, too, is fast picking up Stroustrup-esque features so I'm a bit concerned for losing Python as the no-nonsense swiss-army knife. Esthetically, I'm most impressed with Scheme. One day it might give Python a run for its money. Marko -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
