I really cant Tell if the downvotes stem mostly from the AI usage or c++ copers
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
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It's 2h of AI pics with text read by an AI voice, which you didn't watch all the way through, but still felt you needed to share anyway.
Thanks for warning before I clicked the video. Saved me the click.
Edit: wasn't AI after all. Just a cheap microphone.
Or it's low bit rate audio which is easier for AI to generate.
It's wrong. The voice is not AI.
Clicked it, and you are right. It's not AI at all, just not a professional microphone.
The voice is not AI, the video is quite good imo minus the slop pics.
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javascript exists; his point is invalid
I also agree that Javascript is worse. C++ has two excuses for being bad:
- It has to be compatible with C, a language that's multiple decades older than it, and
- It is not garbage collected.
Javascript has neither of those two excuses. People only use it today because of the ubiquity of web programming. In fairness, it did kill off a few other technologies, like Flash and Java applets, but that was more Webkit and Chrome picking it as the winner than anything else.
Maybe these arguments are a bit hand-wavy, but the way I see it, it's like the C of the web programming era.
My Brother Here are 2 for you from a java guy:
- JS was hastily put together
- it was Never meant to be used for something other than some interactivity in the web Actually Here is a Third one:
- it had to be redesigned from a lisp to a java Like Language for Marketing purposes..
It also has a Lot of footguns but isnt nearly as cluttered and complicated and lets you Focus on your task at hand more
compatible with C
myth
It may not be perfectly compatible, but being mostly compatible with C was a large part of its selling point when it was originally announced. Without that, it probably wouldn't have seen as much adoption. However, that choice also led to a lot of difficult design decisions which have become a liability today.
mostly compatible with C
It's not mostly compatible, not even on the surface level, with any version of C post C89. And most of the ever-growing crap in the language came after the early years anyway, with constructs that are C++-exclusive.
JavaScript isn't even close to the worst language to ever exist.
I program JavaScript for a living. I’ve noticed how I’ve become blind to my language’s idiosyncracies, but I still believe it isn’t super bad. Especially with all the new shiny features that were piled on ever since 2018-ish (I think).
It is definitely nowhere near as bad as C++. And I’m only 6 minutes into the video.
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I'm all for humourous roasts of things, but does anyone really find this funny? Was the author possibly being serious? I don't know. What I do know is that I stopped watching after the first four examples because they were all deliberately incorrect or misleading, but also didn't seem funny to me.
- Crazy initialization
That sure is a lot of ways to initialize a variable! Even though some of these variables are quite different and would be initialized differently from each other in many other languages, even only counting the initializations that are functionally equivalent, there are a bunch of abuses of syntax that I've never seen used in the wild.
At this point I had hope that this was meant to be amusing.
- Printing to the console
C++ has had a version of C's printf function from the very beginning. That weird stream syntax has some hardcore fans but many people ignore it. I did my CS degree close to 30 years ago, and the only time I used stream syntax was for one lab class exercise in which we had to show that we understood how to use stream syntax.
They still could be going for a comedy roast, I guess.
- Getting a random number
Much like the printf statement for number 2 above, C++ had its own version of C's rand function from the start. I've never even heard of the stuff that's being shown in this part of the video.
OK that was virtually the same fake point as the previous one, and still no punchlines in sight.
- Having to type "static_cast" every time you recast a variable
Nope, you don't. You're free to ask the compiler to automagically recast your variables to another type without giving any further detail just like you can in C. In fact, they're often called "C-style casts". There are even implicit casts, where you literally don't add anything, and just cross your fingers that the compiler does what you think it should do. It's like a little bit of the thrill of dynamic typing brought into C++! By using the static_cast keyword, you can tell the compiler that you understand that there's a potential issue with this recast, but that you expect that the standard way of handling it will be fine. There are other keywords for more unusual situations; it's not just a random bit of busywork added for no reason.
I don't think it was a comedy roast, more like a rant.
The core message of the video (and I do agree with that) is that C++ is incredibly cluttered and that there are dozens of ways to do the same simple thing.
And sure, you don't need to know them all when writing code, but when reading someone else's code you need to know all of the options to understand it.
- Crazy initialization That sure is a lot of ways to initialize a variable! Even though some of these variables are quite different and would be initialized differently from each other in many other languages, even only counting the initializations that are functionally equivalent, there are a bunch of abuses of syntax that I’ve never seen used in the wild.
Initialization in C++ is so simple that somebody wrote a nearly 300-page book on the subject: https://www.cppstories.com/2023/init-story-print/
I plan to read it after finishing this 260 page book on move schematics in C++: https://www.cppmove.com/
Initialization in C++ is so simple that somebody wrote a nearly 300-page book on the subject
There's a book about 101 ways to cut potatoes. Perhaps that could be a real mike-drop bit of evidence that we shouldn't be cooking potatoes.
Here's a 249-page book "just" about atomics and locks in Rust. Does a book this large about only one aspect of Rust prove that it's a terrible language? No, because as with the C++ book, if we look at the summary of contents we can see that it actually covers a great deal more, simply with a focus on those topics.
Luckily we don't have to be compete masters of every aspect of a language in order to use it.
Honestly, I think that modern C++ is a very piecemeal language with no clear direction, and it has many issues because of that. But the title and page count of a single book is not a convincing argument of anything.
That is not just a book about how to "cut potatoes". That is "A Creative Cooking Guide for Exercising Knife Skills", using potatoes as a medium. Similarly, your Rust book is an book on concurrency using Rust as a medium, as per the title: "Low-Level Concurrency in Practice". Both are complex topics, and both have picked a medium. Thus, they do not necessarily reflect on the underlying complexity of the medium, though concurrency in Rust is a complex topic due to the fact that the core language itself does a lot of work to make it "safe". Async would probably be an even better example of that.
However, in the case of initialization in C++ and in the case of move schematics in C++, these are topics that are complex because the core language has been accumulating complexity for a long time, and because the language designers cannot afford to break backwards compatibility. Which makes implementing and using move-schematics in C++, as an end-user of the language, much, much more complicated than in a language like Rust, that did not have to bolt this behavior on top of an already complicated language. Similarly with initialization, where C++ has accumulated many, syntactically overlapping forms of initialization, for both member and non-member variables variables
Here’s a 249-page book “just” about atomics and locks in Rust. Does a book this large about only one aspect of Rust prove that it’s a terrible language? No
If that book was about a million ways of how to just use atomics in Rust, then yes, that would be potentially bad. But SURPRISE SURPRISE, it's not. As you can see for yourself.
Not sure what you were getting at there. Even hard C++ copers don't attempt to argue against the fact that C++ is huge, and not only that, it's the biggest language around by an easy margin (this can be roughly and superficially measured by comparing spec sizes).
It's not the size, but rather everything on top of it, and contributing to it, from general incoherence to bad design to countless misfeatures, that require non-trivial argumentation.
Your comment seems to be trying to disagree with me, but I think you wrote almost the same things that I wrote in the comment that you're replying to:
- The Rust book is about much more than just what's in its title (my point being that this also goes for the cited C++ book).
- C++ is a baroque and sometimes unwieldy language.
if you like C++, you dont know it well enough
Or you are a masochist and just used to the abuse.
The video isn't humorous, it's dead serious. C++ is terrible language.
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what's worse it's people like the mod here 🖕
You don't need a specific video to understand this simple truth.
Im sure his point could be made in less than 2 hours
And it was, the last half hour is not about c++ but his bad editor.
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