My two previous articles were quite mild in their critique of the C++ programming language. This may be party due to the fact that I've now moved on to other programming languages, and thus avoided learning C++ more in depth. (Actually, I'm hopelessly late even on C99, which was released two years after I learned C)
But another more enterprising developer learned in depth C++ and throughly listed what he didn't like about its design. Yossi Kreinin's site is actually a point-by-point refute of the highly biased C++ FAQ Lite, though it is summarized in the aptly named page Defective C++.
After reading what Yossi wrote, I may even go back to my original assessment of other languages like Perl. While Perl's strange syntax can be essentially explained by it being inspired by older scripting languages popular in UNIX-like systems, it does avoid the pitfall of attempting to present a design style beyond its original mandate of a quick-and-dirty language. C++ should have never been both based on C and be an object-oriented programming language within the same syntax style. I really believe that Objective-C's approach of keeping the two design styles (C and OO) distinctively different in their syntax would have been the proper approach for C++. Oh well.
Published on June 21, 2013 at 21:32 EDT
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