everything old is new again

If recycling will save the planet, then the recycled platitudes and fallacious arguments in this one thread should go a long way.

It's clever of "Tom" to say C++ must be easy to learn because C and sed(??!) were. When C++ was coming into widespread use, it was a common argument that, "I hearned Pascal and C in a few weeks, how hard could C++ be?" But the reality was different. If you knew Pascal, then learning C was just learning how to spell the keywords; the coding paradigms were the same. But with C++, you *also* had to learn OOP. And exceptions. And generic programming with templates. And STL. Learning C++ was like learning C half a dozen times. Everybody thought they'd just quickly master C++, but in reality it took even good programmers 2 years.

Then there's "auser" and the smalltalk wheeze. C++ isn't *really* object oriented because it isn't like smalltalk. C++ can't do dynamic programming (by which I assume he really means polymorphism, which C++ does fine, just not like smalltalk). It's easy to learn your first programming languatge. It's easy to learn your 10th programming language. But learning your second language is hard, because it isn't just like your first language. So that second language seems all wrong. Once you've learned a dozen languages, you know that.

Only these days we don't learn a dozen languages. Innovation has stagnated. C++ sucks in many ways, but it works reasonably well. And a C++ compiler is a humongous thing. Wirth turned out a compiler for Pascal in about 5000 lines of Pascal code. I don't know how big GCC is, but I'm guessing a million lines. Not an easily duplicated effort for a single researcher. That leaves microsoft in charge of innovation, with predictable results.