Programming

I'm learning c++ via exercism because I'd like to use it for game development and other high performance use cases, and because it's a good pip for the resume.

In fact, I mostly did this because so many job listings mention it, haven't even come up with a high-scale game dev problem to solve.

I'll probably continue because I find it interesting and no amount of practice is bad, but my question is how is everyone letting this affect their outlook on c++ in their career vs side projects, etc. Really, I'm having a hard time imagining why it was important for this to be said in this way instead of just changing internal policies and job listings.

C++ can have excellent performance without ever using a single pointer and avoiding unsafe functions like gets() - this isn't necessarily a judgment on language - it's a judgement on bad programming habits.

Pointers fucking suck, in a modern C++ codebase everything should be pass by value or const/mutable ref. To my preference I'd rather drop mutable refs to force everything to be more functional but whatever.

I'm going to advocate for C here: the sheer simplicity, fast compile times, and power it gives you means it's not a bad language, even after all these years. Couple that with the fact that everything supports it.

Rust, while I don't actually know how to write it, seems much more difficult to learn, slower to compile, and if you want to do anything with memory, you have to fight the compiler.

And memory bugs are only a subset of bugs that can be exploited in a program. Pretending Rust means no more exploitation is stupid.

I’m going to probably be downvoted to Hell, but I disagree wholly that it’s the language’s fault that people can exploit their programs. I’d say it’s experience by the programmer that is at fault, and that’s due to this bootcamp nature of learning programming.

I’d also blame businesses that emphasize quantity over quality, which then gets reflected in academia because schools are teaching to what they believe business wants in a programmer. So they’re just churning out lazy programmers who don’t know any better.

There needs to be an earnest revival of good programming as a whole; regardless of language, but also specifically to language. We also need to stop trying to churn out programmers in the shortest time possible. That’s doing no one any good.

That’s my two cents.