Coffee and See Plus Plus
Do you remember the first time you had coffee? A lot of people relate their first experience as a bad one, and that coffee is an acquired taste. I can’t relate to that because I’ve always loved coffee, from my very first taste, but I understand the notion, and I want to relate that idea to C++ for a minute. C++ is a language that by all modern standards is an awful mess, but one that is arguably most important to learn and understand due to the manual management of the heap and stack.
Ok, so lets say you dive into C++ because you’re interested in knowing everything there is to know about programming. You discover it’s like your coffee experience; It’s bitter, it smells funny, and gives you jitters, but you keep on sipping it because you know it will give you benefits. Fast forward 6 months, and you’re practically hooking it up to your arm with an IV needle. Now you feel very comfortable with it, and you’ve learned a significant amount of other related knowledge as a result of your endeavours. You’re ready to move on to new things, satisfied that you used it as a learning tool, but are you really done with it? Ohh no.
And in that sense, it’s more like cocaine than coffee.
The gaming industry, or any industry that possesses an interest in high-performance computing applications, is addicted to C++. Regardless of how far garbage collection has come, or how good virtualization abstractions have gotten, they cling to it proclaiming “JUST ONE MORE HIT MAN, JUST ONE MORE HIT”. I sympathize on the one hand because C++ ought to be mandatory learning material for computer science students, but at the same time, haven’t we come far enough with the performance of other languages that we can just go ahead and take C++ out back of the shed?