Post #1763951

2026-04-29 03:54 UTC

@tranquillity@mastodon.minionflo.net I can really see why omg. and I’m only on chapter 6/21 of an introductory book on the language it feels like they tried to make C nicer to use with abstractions, but then those abstractions turned out to be horrendously leaky so they tried to fix those with even leakier abstractions. so now I’ve got 3 ways to do everything and all of them are footguns

Replies (1)

@tranquillity@mastodon.minionflo.net 2026-04-29 04:10

@kasdeya@cryptid.cafe yep, that's indeed what they did lmao That's the ++ in C++. It had to eg. mostly stay backwards-compatible with C, and they don't know what restraint is. (Well, nowadays they do, but it's too late) There are sane way of doing things but it's not exactly intuitive whatsoever, the language is really hard to read without an LSP/IDE (and I read & write nontrivial Java without an LSP/IDE) for me I've been forced to work with C++ due to having to do stuff on Firefox, WebKit, some shader compilers in GPU drivers, LLVM, smartmontools... I genuinely hate it. To be clear, I suck at C++ (I don't have to know Ruby to guess how to make eg. Mastodon to do what I want either tho, it's all the same in the end), but no other language gave me as much pain as C++ this consistently so far. As a random aside, I have incredible difficulty learning from textbooks, and generally consider them kinda bad for teaching any kinda programming language, but everyone learns differently, so (I learned C++ by writing code & fucking around, reading docs, parts of the spec, and random things written in C++). Funnily I did try learning C++ from a C++ "textbook" (online website thingy in textbook format) quite a few years back and failed, and looking back, it's kinda terrible.

Open ##1763950