On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 04:36:18AM -0700, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thursday, January 25, 2018 17:20:21 H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 01:08:10AM +0000, Mike Franklin via Digitalmars-d
> wrote:
> > > On Wednesday, 24 January 2018 at 09:35:44 UTC, lobo wrote:
> > > > And I'm broken after using D, going back to C++ is awful and Rust just has too much friction to be enjoyable.
> > >
> > > Yep, I know exactly what you mean.
> >
> > Me Too (tm).  After having gotten used to D, working with C/C++ (or just about any other language, really) is just extremely painful. Unfortunately, I have no choice because my day job requires C/C++. D has officially ruined my life. :-D
> 
> Well at least you don't have to program in Java. :)
> 
> Unless something has changed in one of the recent versions, you can't even write a swap function in Java. :|

I haven't touched Java in a long while, but the last time I looked, it wasn't too horrible of a language. Needlessly verbose, yes. Breaks DRY, yes. Shoehorns everything into an OO model, even where it doesn't fit, yes. But in terms of the language itself, it's kinda pretty in its own way, even if it's in an idealistic, detached-from-the-real-world kind of way.  At least you're not worried about buffer overruns, memory leaks, and inscrutible pointer bugs that could literally be *anywhere* in the entire 20,000-file codebase.

Overall, I'd say Java is an OK language, not horrible, but not that great either. The only thing that makes it shine is really the wealth of libraries out there that you can draw from. I'd rate it as a "meh", whereas C is pretty horrible in spite of being extremely powerful, and C++ is just masochistic (though I confess I haven't looked into its latest incarnations -- the C++ code I have to work with dates back to C++98 and probably isn't going to change anytime in the foreseeable future).


> It's definitely painful to have to program in C++ after programming in D, but I still find C++ to be more pleasant than the alternatives other than D.
[...]

I'm torn between whether C or C++ is worse. In some ways, I actually prefer C because the language is smaller, the semantics are more straightforward, and the potential dangers are well-known and well-studied.  It doesn't lessen the pain, but at least you have well-established maps with which to navigate through the minefield.

C++, OTOH... perhaps my opinion is biased by having had the misfortune of working with an overengineered, overdesigned C++ codebase that exemplified all the flaws of C++ and none of its advantages (thankfully, said codebase has been replaced... good riddance *shudder*). But when you're dealing with code where useful work is done inside dtors and where making a conceptual function call involves 6 layers of abstraction, one step of which involves fwrite()'ing parameters into a temporary file and fread()'ing from the other end, the only thing that can possibly come to mind is "where's my 10-foot pole and why am I not using it", and "is it even humanly possible to understand what this code actually does?!".  C++ is just far too big, far too complex for any mortal to fully comprehend, and that's not even beginning to touch the semantics of a convoluted codebase that abuses the language in every possible way.  No thanks, if I had the choice, I'm staying away from C++ as far as I possibly can.


T

-- 
MAS = Mana Ada Sistem?